Hybrid workers are fed up with the tech tools they're using for remote meetings, according to research from Owl Labs, saying constant glitches are wasting their time.

Almost three quarters (74%) of UK employees say they would prefer to work in a hybrid model. And those that do are fiercely attached to it, with 93% insisting they'd take some form of action if they were forced to go into the office every day.

Yet despite a continued appetite for flexible working practices, Owl Labs found nearly three-quarters (74%) of employees are having difficulties in hybrid meetings.

Around eight-in-ten (79%) said they were losing time to technical difficulties, 78% reporting audio echo or distortion, and 74% saying they miss visual cues.

One of the biggest time-wasters is simply getting a meeting set up, which wastes an average of six-and-a-half minutes per meeting.

As a result, tech is now a top‑three workplace priority, with 89% of UK employees saying access to good technology is important – putting it just behind compensation (92%) and a supportive manager (91%).

The issue is a particular focus for workers in large businesses, where 93% of employees cite good technology as important, compared with 88% in medium-sized organizations and 84% in small businesses.

Younger workers are especially demanding when it comes to digital experiences, with more than half (54%) of Gen Z and Millennial employees rating good technology as “very important”, compared with just a third (35%) of Gen X and Boomers.

"Technology has moved from a support function to core hybrid infrastructure. When meeting technology fails, it doesn’t just cause mild annoyance, it undermines wellbeing and derails collaboration,” said Frank Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs.

"Employers and employees alike can’t afford for their most important interactions to be held together by last-minute workarounds.”

Enterprises are investing in better office tech

Employers are doing their best to improve office tech, with 69% encouraging the use of AI and 87% of employees having already experimented with AI at work.

More than one-third (38%) have increased IT staff and support, while 35% have either installed or upgraded their meeting room video and/or audio equipment.

“The UK is at a turning point: organizations are investing heavily in AI and meeting technology, but the real value comes when those tools are intuitive, inclusive and trusted,” said Weishaupt.

“Smarter meeting technology can alleviate setup challenges, sharpen audio and video, and make it easier for everyone to participate, without resorting to intrusive monitoring. In the next phase of hybrid work, the organizations that rely on ever‑tighter monitoring will fall behind those that focus on smarter, more connected collaboration.”

Researchers have long been aware that online meetings are uniquely exhausting. The issue was exacerbated during the mass shift to remote working during the early days of the COVID pandemic.

Analysis from Microsoft at the time found remote calls were much more tiring that face-to-face meetings, with fatigue setting in after about 30 to 40 minutes.

Having a uniform background can help, as can basic etiquette like staying on mute until ready to talk, and using good-quality audio and video equipment.

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Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy called for Indian workers to adopt a 70-hour week last year, but he thinks that’s still not enough and wants to take things further.

Speaking during a recent interview, Murthy called for an increase in working hours from 70 to 72. That number represents the total hours worked by those on the infamous '996' schedule, which involves working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.

This approach, Murthy noted, appears to be the ideal format for enterprises to drive innovation, maximize employee productivity, and essentially represents real “hard work”.

“No individual, no community, no country, has ever come up without hard work,” he said. “When I say hard work, not going to the office and sleeping there. When I say hard work it means hard and smart work.”

While Murthy is keen on the 996 approach, it’s not quite all it’s cut out to be in terms of workforce productivity. The practice was widely employed by businesses in China, but was banned by lawmakers in August 2021.

Research from the World Health Organization found longer work schedules have a serious negative impact on both physical and mental wellbeing for employees.

Those working more than 55 hours a week were linked with higher health risks compared to those working a standard 35-40 hour week, for example.

Not Murthy’s first rodeo

This isn’t the first time Murthy has advocated for longer working hours, or courted controversy on working practices. When he called for younger workers to up their hours to 70 last year, his comments sparked a national debate over working conditions and the potential long-term effects of this approach.

Those comments came hot on the heels of an interview with CNBC in which he criticized the concept of work-life balance and slammed the country’s shift to a five-day work week in 1986 as bad for the economy.

Despite Murthy’s views on the matter, a string of studies in recent years have found shorter working weeks actually make employees more productive.

A trial scheme of a four-day work week in Iceland, for example, was found to have marked benefits for employees, including higher mental and emotional wellbeing, with researchers hailing the pilot as a “real success story”.

Moreover, productivity and economic output actually increased at companies adhering to this schedule. A similar scheme at Microsoft Japan resulted in a 40% increase in output off the back of a four-day work week.

Long hours in tech are becoming a trend

While the 996 trend was outlawed in China, in big tech it’s become somewhat of a trend in recent months. A recent investigation by the New York Times showed this working practice has been gaining traction among some “hustle culture” entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

While the publication noted that entrepreneurs boasting about their own 9-9-6 approach on social media highlights anecdotal evidence of the trend gaining traction, separate reports from Axios found that some companies in the tech industry have begun actively promoting “7 day weeks” in job postings.

The industry’s scramble to drive AI adoption certainly hasn’t helped things, either, with big tech providers and enterprises alike pushing workers harder to deliver returns on investment with the technology.

Earlier this year, Google co-founder Sergey Brin suggested working 60 hours was the 'sweet spot of productivity' for developers.

In a leaked memo, Brin noted that those who “put in the bare minimum to get by” during their working week were “not only unproductive but also can be highly demoralizing to everyone else”.

For developers, the concept might not have such appeal given the profession has been contending with surging levels of burnout and mental health issues over the last five years.

JetBrains' 2024 State of the Developer Ecosystem report, for example, found nearly three-quarters of developers have dealt with burnout at some point in their career.

Aside from the obvious personal impact of burnout on individual employees, the issue has long-term implications for broader workforce efficiency and financial returns.

Analysis from Harness in late 2024 found the issue costs enterprises globally as much as $1 trillion each year.

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With enterprises worldwide ramping up AI adoption rates, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan thinks the technology will ultimately pave the way for millions of workers to shift to reduced working hours.

In a recent interview with the New York Times, Yuan said the use of AI will streamline workflows, essentially freeing up staff from carrying out mundane tasks.

“I feel like if AI can make all of our lives better, why do we need to work for five days a week?” Yuan told the publication. “Every company will support three days, four days a week.”

“I think this ultimately frees up everyone’s time,” he added.

Yuan’s comments mark the latest in a string of predictions by big tech execs on the potential for AI to deliver a three or four-day working week.

Yuan’s comments mark the latest in a string of predictions by big tech execs on the potential for AI to deliver a three or four-day working week.

In an August 2023 appearance on Trevor Noah’s What Now? podcast, Bill Gates hinted that AI-related efficiency gains could “eventually get a society where you only have to work three days a week”.

More recently, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang also touted the potential for a four-day week through AI in an interview with Fox Business.

“I fully expect GDP to grow. I expect productivity to increase. I actually expect us to have more things to do,” he told host Liz Claman.

“I’m hopeful for that day too, so that we have four-day work weeks… so that we could spend more time on the weekends with family and get some reading done, and do some travelling. Nothing is better than that.”

A four-day week is the holy grail of work-life balance

Calls for a four-day week have been gathering momentum in recent years, with a host of pilot schemes showing the practice offers marked benefits for workers.

With AI adoption rates continuing at pace globally, similar research has suggested the technology could help to reduce working hours. Analysis from Autonomy last year, for example, claimed the use of AI tools could cut the equivalent of a whole working day for over 8 million workers across the UK.

The study also found AI could unlock an average 10% reduction in working hours for an additional 27.9 million UK employees by the end of the decade.

Autonomy noted this 10% reduction would equate to working hours being cut for around 88% of the current UK workforce.

A catch-22 for workers

While comments from Yuan and industry counterparts will likely be welcomed by workers, the situation isn’t quite so positive. Indeed, the Zoom CEO noted that while those currently in work may benefit from the technology, long-term labor market shifts as a result of AI adoption could impact entry-level workers.

“Whenever there’s a technology paradigm shift, some job opportunities are gone, but it will create some new opportunities,” he said. “For some jobs, like entry-level engineers, we can use AI to write code.”

“However, you still need to manage that code. You also create a lot of digital agents, and you need someone to manage those agents.”

Notably, Huang’s positive outlook on future working setups was tempered by the fact he believes AI will actually make workers busier in the future despite the so-called efficiency gains unlocked by the technology.

Yuan isn’t the first big tech executive to raise concerns about the impact of AI on entry-level workers in recent months.

Earlier this year, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned that the technology would eliminate up to half of all entry-level, white-collar roles in years to come.

A study from Stanford University in August suggested AI is already starting to have a negative impact, with those entering the workforce facing an increasingly challenging jobs market.

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Microsoft is reportedly considering a crackdown on remote working as the tech giant plots to get staff back into the office more.

According to reports from Business Insider, the company intends to tighten up in-office attendance requirements in the new year - a move that comes alongside a new performance improvement plan in the wake of layoffs.

Microsoft has previously said it wouldn't implement a full return to office (RTO) mandate unless faced with a drop-off in productivity. At the beginning of 2024, the tech giant announced a wave of layoffs aimed specifically at culling underperforming staff.

In this instance, however, the reported plans don’t represent a full RTO, according to Business Insider. The publication noted that the new policy will require most employees to head into the office three days a week as part of a hybrid work setup.

That's a bit tighter than Microsoft's existing policy that asked staff to come in at least half of the time unless they had manager approval. But the report notes that wasn't strictly enforced and most staff worked at home as much as they chose.

The stricter hybrid policy is a far cry from the full RTO mandate at Dell Technologies, as well as Amazon, which last year demanded staff return to a full five days a week in the office.

Amazon’s crackdown on remote working sparked an employee backlash, while staff at Dell Technologies voiced concerns about the policy in the company’s annual feedback survey.

Microsoft plans aren't set in stone

At this point, Microsoft is believed to be merely considering the shift — so any Redmond staffers should let their thoughts be known to higher-ups before the announcement is made, which is expected to be in September with changes coming into force in January.

ITPro approached Microsoft for comment on the reports, but did not receive a response by time of publication.

A spokesperson for the tech giant told Business Insider that it was indeed considering a shake-up, but confirmed no final decision has been made.

Most employees appear to favor working from home, and no wonder with research suggesting hybrid working leaves workers feeling happier and more productive.

Frequent headlines about RTOs — largely at tech companies as well as across the financial sector — have sparked concerns among workers that they'll be forced to start paying for commuting again and lose their work-life balance, and recent research suggests an increase in RTO mandates.

But they risk employees quitting in favor of companies with more flexible working arrangements, according to a survey of British professionals.

A survey conducted by Hays in April 2025 suggested 48% would consider finding a new role if faced with a full RTO mandate.

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Nearly half of IT workers in the UK have quit a job due to a lack of workplace flexibility, according to new research.

Analysis from Randstad shows 40% of UK-based IT pros have quit over a lack of flexible work options, while 31% of workers globally have done the same.

The study noted that IT workers typically value flexible working practices more highly than other sectors, with 80% of surveyed professionals stating that they consider flexibility “essential”.

This was also 13% higher than their counterparts in other industries globally, according to Randstad.

Notably, Randstad said flexibility is no longer regarded “solely as a benefit” at their workplace, and is now a deal breaker which shapes their career choices and has an influence on who they want to work with.

More than half (56%), for example, said they would quit their job if requests for additional flexible working options weren’t taken into account.

Randstad digital chief executive Graig Paglieri said the study highlights the changing nature of worker demands and urged employers to accommodate for this trend.

“Personalized work benefits and flexible options are essential not only for attracting top talent but also for retaining them in competitive markets,” he said.

“Policies should align with organizational, team and individual needs, ensuring a flexible and tailored approach.”

Flexible work options build trust

Nearly three-quarters (71%) of IT workers told Randstad that remote and flexible working options would “strengthen their sense of community” with colleagues, despite the distributed nature of the workforce.

Similarly, 68% said they would trust their employer more if they offered personalized work benefits. This not only included flexible work options, but flexible hours, intensity of work, and locations, the study noted.

Flexible working has grown in popularity since the onset of Covid in 2020. While at first workers across a raft of industries shifted to remote work options as a pandemic-induced necessity, they continued to demand a degree of flexibility in their roles as lockdown restrictions were lifted.

The issue has prompted a recurring back and forth between workers and employers in recent years, especially amidst the rise of return to office (RTO) mandates.

Several companies have faced backlash by cutting flexible and remote working options, including Dell Technologies and Amazon.

Randstad noted that employers must adapt to accommodate for flexible working options, or else lose out on vital talent. Nearly one-third (31%) of employers told the firm they now offer flexible work arrangements specifically for the purpose of attracting talent.

This, the study found, marked a 9% increase compared to the year prior.

Similarly, 34% revealed they have introduced flexible policies to improve staff retention and prevent valued employees from seeking roles elsewhere.

Leadership views on flexible work is also improving, according to Randstad. The study noted that 81% of leaders believe these practices can help create equity at work and have a beneficial effect on workforce morale.

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Many UK business leaders want their staff back in the office more frequently, but they’re scared to implement return to office (RTO) mandates in fear of worker revolts.

That’s according to a study from Hubble, which found that 52% of founders expressed a desire for their teams to work in-person. Just 12% said they didn’t mind.

There is concern about pushback from staff, though, with 60% of business leaders worried that stricter office mandates could lead to a surge in resignations.

RTO mandates have proved a controversial element of workplace strategy, Hubble noted. A host of major tech firms have faced staff revolts over stricter attendance strategies in the last year, including Amazon and Dell Technologies.

While RTO mandates are a risky strategy, Hubble’s research suggests that many firms that have adopted office-based strategies are satisfied with their approach. Leaders of fully office-based companies were the least likely to anticipate change in their workplace strategy over the next year.

“The tide seems to be turning towards office attendance. More founders are deciding that perhaps the office is the best place for their employees to be, and they’d like them to come in more often,” Hubble said.

Should business leaders enforce office attendance?

Only 7% of respondents claimed to strictly enforce office attendance by punishing non-attenders with disciplinary measures. More than one-third (37%) moderately enforce office attendance though, meaning it’s mandated but not backed up by disciplinary measures.

Hubble said this raises important questions over how businesses can bring employees back into the office when they aren’t strictly mandating office attendance.

It’s not the office that employees are resisting, though, according to Rebecca Perrault, VP of culture and diversity at Magnit. They’re resisting the mandates themselves, which Perrault thinks mistake visibility for value.

"The best companies don’t need attendance policies to force collaboration; they create workplaces where people want to show up because the time spent together is purposeful, not performative,” Perrault told ITPro.

“The workforce has changed. Top talent is asking: does coming into the office help me do my best work, or is this just a box to tick? If employers can’t answer that question convincingly, they shouldn’t be surprised when their best people vote with their feet,” she added.

RTO polices that focus simply on compliance will push top talent away, Perrault said, and businesses should try and refocus the conversation away from mandates and onto valuing the impact of staff rather than in person attendance.

RTO has caused serious backlash before

Business leaders are right to be worried about how staff might react to stricter RTO mandates given the stir these moves have caused over the last year.

Amazon has been a central part of the conversation, with CEO Andy Jassy announcing in September that the firm would be pivoting to a full five-day RTO scheme.

AWS CEO Matt Garman echoed the sentiment a month later, suggesting staff unhappy with the move should look for work elsewhere.

Employees at the tech giant have been less than pleased with the shift, with hundreds of staff complaining that the move will negatively impact their personal lives with little improvement to efficiency, according to an anonymous survey circulated via Slack.

Dell has been in a similar position since it introduced an RTO mandate, with a leaked internal survey revealing a plummet in a key employee satisfaction metric.

One Dell employee told Business Insider at the time that they had “never seen” a score move that quickly toward the negative.

A generational clash on RTO

The conversation around RTO has also revealed a generational divide, with multiple studies finding that Gen Z is eager to get back into the office while older members of staff are happier with remote working setups.

Research from last year found 80% of younger workers would prefer more time in the office, while research from earlier this month found 91% of Gen Z workers crave a balance between in-person and remote work.

More than two-thirds (69%) claimed that technology has made them feel more disconnected with others in their company or industry, a more pronounced figure than in other generations.

61% and 62% of millennials and Gen X feeling disconnected as a result of technology, respectively.

Many Gen Z workers feel that remote working will also impact their careers, the study found, with many believing that in-person attendance of live events is beneficial to businesses relationships and personal growth.

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Work-life balance has become more important than pay when choosing or staying in a job, according to two new reports.

A recent survey by Randstad found that 83% of workers view flexible working options as their primary consideration ahead of job security and salaries.

Nearly half of the respondents said they had advocated for better working conditions, and a third said they'd actually left a job due to the lack of flexible work options.

"Many expected the challenging economic conditions of 2024 to temper talent expectations, but the Workmonitor shows the opposite has occurred," said Randstad CEO Sander van't Noordende.

"We have seen a new baseline established with talent continuing to hold multifaceted expectations."

Nearly three-quarters of workers said they'd be willing to take a cut in salary in return for a four-day work week, and 76% said they'd do the same for flexible working hours.

The report found that half of UK workers are now working flexibly, with most wanting to be in the office around three days a week and three-quarters saying they prefer hybrid work.

Notably, the report showed not all employers share the same views on the topic of flexible and hybrid working. Employers’ reasons for getting staff back into the office include improved collaboration and innovation and strengthening relationships between colleagues.

These three issues have been frequently cited by employers when implementing return to office mandates over the last year. Enterprises have also cited productivity improvements as a key motivation behind RTO mandates.

However, van't Noordende said employers need to be flexible if they're to keep the best staff.

"For today’s talent, the significance of work is complex and needs to be personalized. They are setting the terms on what truly matters to them as individuals and within their communities," he said.

"Successful businesses are those that will adapt and adjust to this new talent baseline. The solution lies in empowering our key resource: people."

Research from the University of Pittsburgh last year highlighted the risks of failing to offer flexible working, as well as the pitfalls of RTO mandates. The study found firms that implement strict working practices frequently experience ‘brain drain’, with many losing their most senior and experienced employees.

Workers are setting stricter boundaries

Ranstad’s study found employees are finding techniques to try and set stricter boundaries with their work.

These include clock blocking - blocking off times in their calendars to avoid meetings that could extend beyond their designated work hours.

Nearly six-in-ten millennials confess to doing this, along with 22% of Gen Z employees and 16% of Gen X workers.

Similarly, four-in-ten workers said they engage in coffee badging - starting their day with a few hours at the office before heading home to finish their work remotely.

Interestingly, 54% of those who have been caught doing it said their employers weren't bothered.

Workers aren't budging on flexible work

Ranstad’s recent findings correlate with similar research into flexible working arrangements. A study from the Global Payroll Association found that three-quarters of workers would turn down a job that didn’t offer hybrid or remote working options.

Most respondents even said they would prefer these options to a four-day week.

More than half reckoned they were more productive working from home, with 38% saying they were just as productive as they would be in the workplace.

Meanwhile, almost three-quarters said they were more likely to go ‘above and beyond’ for their employer while working remotely, perhaps committing to earlier starts or working later into the evening.

"It’s clear that a flexible working arrangement is now a key requirement in the eyes of many UK workers, so much so that no less than three quarters would now avoid applying for a role that didn’t offer some degree of flexibility," said GPA CEO and founder Melanie Pizzey.

"So whilst there may be a case to prove with respect to the impact remote working can have on productivity, it certainly seems that those firms who completely eradicate it from their professional offering could seriously reduce the talent pool on offer to them when it comes to hiring."

A record number of tech workers are looking for a new job this year, as the benefits offered by employers decline.

In a survey carried out for career hub Dice, 47% said they were actively seeking new roles, marking a sharp rise from 29% last year.

Overall pay is rising, with the average technology professional salary hitting $112,521 in 2024, a 1.2% year-over-year increase. Meanwhile, AI and machine learning expertise is commanding a salary premium of up to 17.7%.

Silicon Valley maintained the highest tech salaries, despite a 7.3% year over year decline.

Manufacturing was the sector where tech salaries showed the highest growth, at 15.1%, while consulting, software, and banking/finance remained the highest-paying industries, each with average tech salaries of more than $125,000.

Notably, mid-career professionals with three to five years' experience saw 6% salary growth. This growth hasn't translated into increased satisfaction, however, with tech workers’ satisfaction with their compensation hitting a new low in 2024.

"While compensation remains important, tech professionals are increasingly focused on the total package — from benefits to job security to professional development opportunities," said Art Zeile, CEO of Dice parent company, DHI Group.

"This presents both challenges and opportunities for employers looking to attract and retain top tech talent in 2025."

AI and machine learning are seen as the most significant technological change of the past two decades, cited by 36% of tech professionals with over 20 years of experience. Cloud computing and virtualization, at 15%, and mobile technologies at 8% rounded out the top three.

Tech professionals working in these areas are not only earning more than their peers not involved in AI work, they also reported higher job satisfaction levels.

However, the report found that six-in-ten tech professionals feel underpaid — the highest percentage ever recorded in the survey. This, Zeile noted, may be linked to the fact that companies have been reducing benefits across every category, from health insurance to professional development opportunities.

"We're seeing a clear disconnect between what tech professionals value and what they're receiving from employers," he said.

"Organizations that can bridge this gap, particularly in areas like remote work flexibility and professional development, will have a significant advantage in attracting top talent in 2025."

Training and education opportunities dropped by six percentage points in 2024, with remote work options declining by four percentage points year-over-year.

Meanwhile, only 36% of tech professionals received merit raises, down from 41% in 2023.

"The reduction in benefits, particularly in areas like professional development and flexible work arrangements, may be contributing to the unprecedented levels of job seeking we're seeing," said Zeile.

"As we mark twenty years of tracking tech careers, it's clear that while we've made progress in some areas, companies need to recognize that in today's tech hiring market, they need to deliver on the total employment package to find and retain the best tech talent."

Some do see improvements on the horizon though, with women in tech with over two decades of experience nearly 1.5 times more likely than their male counterparts to say work culture has improved over the past 20 years.

"This finding suggests real progress in workplace culture," said Zeile. "However, with only 48% of all seasoned tech professionals saying culture has improved, there's still significant work to do in this area."

Employee perceptions of workplace flexibility have changed dramatically in recent years due to the rise of remote and hybrid working, prompting many organizations to reconsider their approach to working practices. 

Research from the Achievers Workforce Institute shows that the definition of flexibility is becoming increasingly fluid for both employers and employees alike. 

Traditionally, the reasons for employees seeking opportunities elsewhere was due to career progression, but now it’s flexibility, according to Caitlin Nobles, lead analyst at the Institute.

“For the first five years that we ran this annual survey, career progression was the number one reason people said they were going to job hunt, but today it's flexibility,” said Nobles. “Most employees who can work from anywhere would like the option to at least sometimes work off site.”

This means that employers now face a critical choice amid what is a challenging period for the labor force. Two-thirds of HR leaders say that they expect labor challenges to worsen, so organizations that embrace flexible working models can differentiate themselves and help retain critical talent. 

Maintaining the flexibility status quo

Megan Woerlein, senior HR leader at Amazon Canada said that key elements within the workforce are pushing to maintain the ‘status quo’ of flexible working.

This is because many who have spent several years working remotely or in a hybrid capacity now view this as a beneficial aspect of their working life.

“I think right now there is a subset of the employee population that sees any sort of return to work mandate as something is being taken away from them,” she said. 

“I think there is this great want and push to maintain the status quo, which I think is hard for employers.”

The topic of flexible working will be the key focal point of a webinar run by the Achievers Workforce Institute on July 12, featuring input from HR leaders at Blue Ivy Group and Amazon Canada. 

Click here more information on how to register for the webinar.

Technology has played a key role in establishing new ways of working since 2020, but it means our work and personal lives have converged. For some among us, it means working longer hours, with less physical separation between work and home life. 

For many, too, the working day now involves back-to-back virtual meetings with little time for creativity or informal connection – both of which are fundamental elements of the overall experience. Recruitment, onboarding, and learning have also been challenged by the lack of in-person contact, with some employees feeling disconnected and unsupported. 

It hasn’t been all bad, though. Flexible schedules have been a huge help for people with care needs, while many appreciate dropping the hours-long commute every day. That freedom has indeed been harnessed in positive ways to rebalance work and life. 

Evidently, everything changed, but not everybody felt the change equally. Technology is  promoting an always-on culture and workers are burning out harder and faster as a result. Thankfully for businesses, though, these same technologies can be pivoted to stripping away the downsides of hybrid work. 

Did COVID-19 really cause productivity to rise?

Several studies into the effects of working from home during the pandemic have linked the lockdown with a rise in productivity, but the University of Essex and the University of Chicago conducted joint research that found the opposite. 

This study was unique in studying metrics rather than reported feelings, comparing productivity before and after the remote working phase of COVID-19 based on analysing data from more than 10,000 people working in a large Asian IT company.

The study found while total hours worked increased by roughly 30% – including an 18% rise in out-of-hours working – average output did not significantly change. Technology played a central part in facilitating this odd shift in working hours. The time spent in meetings powered by videoconferencing rose significantly during the pandemic, as did email traffic. 

Meetings could often break into what would otherwise be periods of uninterrupted work, which may have caused concentration loss and taken workers longer to complete tasks. The research also found while there were more meetings overall, there were fewer supervision meetings and coaching sessions.

“Our explanation is that there were more distractions at home – especially with children – and that the costs of communication and collaboration were significantly higher away from the office,” said Dr Christoph Siemroth, who worked on the study. 

“Time in formal meetings increased a lot, including teleconferences and email traffic also went up. Meetings and other coordination activities appeared to disrupt “focus time” when employees were able to work without interruption. 

“Additional evidence for this view is that employees networked less – they had fewer contacts with colleagues and business units both inside and outside the firm. Despite having more meetings, staff had fewer supervision meetings or coaching sessions.”

This is, however, just one study and others demonstrate the opposite. Those reliant on self-reporting show staff benefit from increased wellbeing, higher productivity and satisfaction, according to research by the UK Parliament. The picture is certainly mixed, and it isn’t an exact science. 

Fighting the always-on culture

What’s clear is the lines are blurring between remote workers’ work and personal lives, a development that Toby Pochron, employment director at law firm Freeths, suggests has continued post-pandemic. 

“With the ability to access work from the comfort of their homes, the line between work and personal time has become blurred,” he says, pointing to how always-on technologies have exacerbated this problem. 

Workers, for example, are constantly connected to not just friends and family but colleagues and employers through the same devices. The ever-present ability to check emails, for example, is a major problem. Once emails are checked, if “urgent” things are identified, there is a temptation to deal with them immediately, even if that means outside working hours. He also identifies virtual meeting fatigue – too many meetings, too frequently, which can lead to a feeling of stress and burnout. 

Amy Finn, people and talent expert, PA Consulting adds another dimension to the levels of stress and anxiety the “always on” culture can bring. She points out that hybrid working allowed some firms to focus on globalization or international working. This brings with it challenges as “employees have found they need to flex working patterns and work longer hours in order to collaborate with virtual teams”. This often removes workers’ control over schedules and may, again, contribute to longer working and out-of-hours working.

Using tech to fight the new burnout

Just as technology is a contributing factor to the new burnout, it can be used to help alleviate it. But it’s vital to recognize that technology is not the answer to burnout, just one tool in the box. 

Pochron suggests time management and productivity tools, mental health and wellbeing apps, and automation can all play a part in helping people manage their work-life balance and avoid burnout. He’s clear that managers need to take a positive role here, for example, “using software to track the performance of remote workers and adjust their workload, or provide them with additional support when necessary”.

Finn echoes this point, telling ITPro that employees need to take control of setting boundaries, but that there’s also a responsibility for the organization to “reset the boundaries and work with their people to define the new rules of engagement”. 

The Gallup report Amplifying Wellbeing at Work and Beyond Through the Power of Recognition, published in 2022, showed fulfilling employee recognition can reduce burnout such that employees are up to 90% less likely to report being burned out at work "always" or "very often". 

Technology can play a part here through digital recognition programs which support, celebrate and promote wellbeing and allow coworkers to bond across remote working situations. Gallup says such programs can help workers get to know each other and fortify social wellbeing.

In all of this, it is vital to realise a few home truths. Firstly, technology is a tool and, used poorly, it can fuel the problem of burnout. Used well, however, it can be a mitigation. Secondly, people are all different, and what one might see as a perfectly fine work pattern that doesn’t generate burnout, another might find challenging. Finally, the need for people to feel connected, valued and well-rewarded is equally important whether work is entirely from home, hybrid or office based. 

The pandemic forced many people out of the office and into their homes literally overnight. Organisations had to adapt – fast – and so did people. Those already ahead on the hybrid working path started with an advantage but, even for them, there was work to do. People who were working remotely a few days a week or month suddenly became people who were working from home all the time. The technology had to be just right, but success relied just as much on supporting people.

As some organisations continue with some form of hybrid working – the nature of which varies wildly between businesses – all organisations are assessing what the key lessons are from the pandemic. The takeaways will vary on so many factors, though, including attitudes to remote working in principle and the overall experience during COVID-19.

Looking at these areas will give any organisations, large or small, including those which struggled the first time around, a perfect set of tools to refine and improve their hybrid working strategy. This isn't just about what technology might be available, but rather how to adapt that technology for use across the workforce, and how people are expecting to be treated in a post-pandemic landscape.

Top technology for hybrid working

The tools that have worked best since the pandemic are the ones that have been best at supporting hybrid working. This statement seems obvious, but the devil is in the detail. “Mapping out the requirements for your business is one thing, but pre-empting how that will work and impact users in their everyday roles is quite another,” Cate Kalson, chief people officer at Opencast, tells IT Pro.

When it comes to implementing hybrid working technologies, this means thinking very practically not only about the technologies themselves, but the impact they have on your people who may be working in the office, at home, in other locations, or any mixture of these. “To solve new problems, you need new solutions. That’s why trying to address hybrid working with old operational processes won’t drive meaningful change,” Kalson adds. “Businesses that understand this have been the most successful at implementing hybrid working policies that stand the test of time.”

What that means is it’s no good jumping onto a cloud platform and thinking the job’s done. There are basics like email that can be standardised across any organisation. But when it comes to collaborative working, co-creation of documents, or any other kind of media and self-managed meeting scheduling, it’s important to think carefully about what tools best suit. It’s easy, too, to overlook the importance of the casual conversation in the office that sparks off a whole new train of thought for a team. From such conversations can come great things – but how can you cater for that in a technology-led environment?

Addressing this in a very practical sense, Kalson tells IT Pro: “One way to achieve this is to carve out a space for it in your organisational structure. For example, a role that might have once been called a ‘facilities manager’ could now be a ‘hybrid experience manager’.”

Flattening your business hierarchy

When the pandemic changed work patterns, companies with flat structures or previous experience with home-working policies had a big advantage, says Jan Hauser, CEO of software developer Applifting. He adds these businesses tended to give their employees both freedom and trust.

“In companies with a flat structure, there are usually different types of people than in companies with a classic hierarchical structure,” Huaser explains. “People are driven to be autonomous, independent, and responsible in the former case. They are encouraged to manage their own time and make important decisions.”

Meanwhile, in more hierarchical settings, decision-making is less autonomous, and a more senior-level thing. For more hierarchical teams or businesses, the move to hybrid working may have been jarring even symbolically through videoconferencing. In the past, senior management may have expressed their authority by occupying lavish offices with perks that allowed them to, say, travel to work in comfort. Once COVID-19 hit, everybody occupied the exact same digital square on the likes of Zoom and Google Meet, regardless of position.

Logically, then, adopting a hybrid model has already gone some way to flattening the structure, and requires businesses to cultivate a more autonomous working environment to at least promote that sense of trust and freedom. Hauser adds that building on a hybrid working model is a choice that “fundamentally changes” how people work, both individually and collectively. “If the change doesn't go hand in hand with a genuine effort to adapt to and iterate on the new dynamic, it can spell trouble.”

Don’t fall into the trap of focusing on tech

When thinking about hybrid working in the longer term, arguably the people management side of things takes precedence over technology. Once your hybrid working tech is in place, people need to use it and must feel that it’s supporting their work, not controlling their work or surveilling them. Employees need to really appreciate the work/life balance that hybrid working can foster, rather than feel themselves as slaves to the machine who struggle to clock off. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) offers advice on hybrid meetings that, for example, focuses more on people than technology, with its top ten tips including just two focussing on technology choices. The remaining eight are firmly focused on areas like people management, meeting etiquette, inclusion and training.

Similarly, echoing Kalson’s suggestion of replacing the ‘facilities manager’ with a ‘hybrid experience manager’, CIPD offers a planner employers can use to assess the suitability of specific roles for hybrid working.

It would seem the pandemic has taught us it’s entirely possible for some sectors to maintain a hybrid workforce – and to do so successfully. The acceleration of digital transformation and growth in the use of cloud technologies has played its part in facilitating the willingness of many organisations to allow workers to continue to be productive remotely for at least some of the time. While an organisation’s technology is what allows work to happen, it is an organisation’s people who make work happen, and supporting them is an ongoing process. Perhaps the most successful organisations in 2023 and beyond will be those who undertake continuous, unrelenting focus on their people for the long term.

‘Quiet hiring’, the latest buzzword permeating the global technology industry, might be more than just a flash-in-the-pan trend for businesses.

This broad term, which refers to organisational approaches to reskilling and retaining critical talent, has emerged in the wake of the pandemic-fuelled ‘quiet quitting’ phase, which saw workers at firms across a range of industries ‘quietly’ refusing to go above and beyond their contractual duties.

Quiet hiring was identified as Gartner’s number one Future of Work trend for 2023, suggesting it’s a practice or approach that businesses will focus on sharply throughout the year. It’s not without justification; amidst a period of acute economic disruption, tightening budgets and talent shortages spanning a host of key industries, Gartner suggests quiet hiring could prove vital for business decision-makers.

What is quiet hiring?

Emily Rose McRae, senior director of research at Gartner tells IT Pro quiet hiring is an approach for organisations to “get skills and capabilities without adding headcount”.

“That’s to contrast it with quiet quitting,” she says, “which would ultimately be an organisation losing skills or capabilities, but not losing headcount.”

Fundamentally, quiet hiring as a concept involves placing a stronger focus on maximising the potential of current staff by offering them the chance to upskill, retrain, or move to other areas of the business. The aim is meeting the demand of certain critical functions that may be short-staffed or otherwise left lacking.

“It’s a way to get the skills and capabilities where you need them and redistribute what you have to where it’s going to have the most strategic value,” McRae adds.

“It’s recognising a reality that we’re all facing right now, which is that the talent shortage is materially impacting our businesses. We are not able to do things that are part of our strategic plan because we don’t have enough talent, or the right talent.”

How does quiet hiring work in practice?

A prime example, McRae says, would be an organisation with a ten-strong data science team seeking to fill five new positions, but not being able to fill these roles within a realistic timeframe.

“You could suddenly offer way more money in the market to try and attract people faster, but that’s expensive, and with current economic uncertainty, it’s not necessarily an option for a lot of businesses,” she says.

To compensate, the hypothetical organisation could source talented analysts within the HR or marketing team, for example, and reassign them to work within the data science function to plug the gaps.

However, while this appears to be a straightforward decision, there are pitfalls, McRae notes. Not least of all in terms of cross-functional skills capabilities.

“The problem here is they aren’t data scientists, they’re analysts, and there might be some skills missing there. So how do you deal with that? Well, one option would be to upskill them; send them to a bootcamp or do an apprenticeship.”

“Another option would be to actually redesign the role, so the data scientists focus on compensating for the skills the analysts don’t have and they can do the things that they’re familiar with.

“You could also hire contractors to do the complex statistical programming that’s not normally in the analysts’ wheelhouse.”

Is quiet hiring right for your business?

All too often, organisations and business leaders have a tendency to get caught up in the latest buzzword trend and buy into the hype and hyperbole surrounding new technologies, leadership approaches, or management styles.

With quiet hiring, this is no different, and McRae emphasises it isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach. There are nuanced considerations businesses and senior teams must take into account when pursuing this approach – whether it’s right for their individual circumstances.

This is particularly relevant for smaller businesses, McRae adds, who simply might not have the headcount or capacity to redirect talent and resources to other areas of the business.

“For some companies this isn’t going to fly,” she says. “For some companies, they’re going to look at quiet hiring and say ‘no, HR people are HR people, marketing people are marketing people” and they’re not open to that idea. Culturally this doesn’t work for some.”

What are the business benefits of quiet hiring?

Amidst a period of tightening budgets, hiring freezes and growing economic uncertainty, McRae says quiet hiring offers businesses a range of benefits, including creating a more cross-functional workforce that understands the acute challenges faced by the organisation.

“It can absolutely create a more agile workforce as a whole, who have some background knowledge to start with that allows them to adapt to a lot of different circumstances and move more easily across the business,” she explains.

Similarly, in terms of alternative benefits for the organisation, McRae notes this approach can prove highly beneficial in creating future leaders who understand the acute challenges facing the organisation.

These employees could be vital in terms of long-term success due to their understanding of strategic goals and considerations.

“It also, frankly, helps build your leadership pipeline, because the more cross-functional experience people have, the better leaders at an organisation they’ll be,” she adds. “They won’t be so siloed into a part of the business. So that’s a benefit for the employee and the organisation to have people who understand the business better.”

Are there employee benefits to quiet hiring?

While there are tangible business benefits to quiet hiring, McRae says that in terms of individual employee benefits, there is a “tricky” element at play here.

She notes that while a key benefit for employees is the potential for increased internal mobility, and the opportunity to upskill or retrain, employees are still ultimately beholden to senior leadership.

Therefore, employees making proactive moves to capitalise on the opportunities of quiet hiring may encounter difficulty. There are, however, some things individuals within an organisation can do.

“It is an opportunity to increase your skills and value within an organisation,” she says. “But the thing that makes this different from your standard internal mobility, so applying for a new role within the organisation, is that that is coming from the employee.

“Quiet hiring, as an approach, is coming from senior leadership. The direction is different. You can make suggestions, you can actively reach out to parts of the business that you know are hiring, or struggling, and suggest you rotate in.

“Those are just some of the things you can do to jump start this on an individual basis. But this really does come from senior leadership.”

What are the downsides to quiet hiring?

Some employees within an organisation pursuing a quiet hiring policy or approach may view this with hesitancy, McRae notes.

In recent years, workforces across a range of industries have become increasingly burnt out and taken on heavier workloads, which has been exacerbated by talent shortages. The key difference with quiet hiring, however, is that it isn’t a case of employees being lumbered with additional work, it’s a redistribution of those individuals to other areas of the business.

“There is 100% a risk [of burnout],” she says. “What keeps it from coming to that is really whether you’re doing quiet hiring right. You’re not doing quiet hiring right if you ask someone to take on responsibilities on top of their normal job.

“The reality is that if this is not a good fit for you, you’re able to say no. Because, your company still values your work. And that might sound counterintuitive, telling your company no, but in this circumstance you 100% can.

“Now, that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t have a bad manager that wouldn’t respond poorly to it, or senior leadership that would respond poorly to it. But the reality is that your skills are so valued that they want to move them over into another part of the business. Trust that if you needed to, you could look somewhere else, but also that they want to keep you.”

Google has reportedly asked employees to begin sharing desks at several sites across the US as part of a “real estate efficiency” drive.

Employees at Google’s cloud division will be asked to pair up with colleagues and alternate in-office shift patterns as part of the move, according to reports from CNBC.

Internal documents seen by the publication reveal that the new policy will be enacted at five of Google Cloud’s largest US locations, including Kirkland, Washington, New York City, San Francisco, Seattle, and the Sunnyvale office in California.

This “real estate efficiency” drive will enable the company to “continue to invest in [Google] Cloud’s growth" and could result in some buildings being vacated as a result, documents show.

“Most Googlers will now share a desk with one other Googler,” the documents state. “Through the matching process, they will agree on a basic desk setup and establish norms with their desk partner and teams to ensure a positive experience in the new shared environment.”

Leadership at Google Cloud has named the new office policy “Cloud Office Evolution”, describing it as a means of “combining the best of pre-pandemic collaboration with the flexibility” of hybrid work patterns.

According to CNBC, the new office policy shift has been met with derision among staff, with employees taking to Memegen - an internal company platform - to make fun of the changes.

“A simple ‘we are cutting office space to reduce costs’ would make leadership sound more believable,” one post read.

A spokesperson for Google Cloud told IT Pro that the decision to introduce this new policy follows a number of pilots and surveys conducted with employees “to explore different hybrid work models and help shape the best experience”.

“Our data show Cloud Googlers value guaranteed in-person collaboration when they are in the office, as well as the option to work from home a few days each week,” the spokesperson said.

“With this feedback, we’ve developed our new rotational model, combining the best of pre-pandemic collaboration with the flexibility and focus we’ve all come to appreciate from remote work, while also allowing us to use our spaces more efficiently.”

Cost-cutting measures

Google has been vocal about enacting cost-cutting measures in recent months as the economic downturn hits businesses spanning the global tech industry.

The tech giant has been downsizing its physical footprint at sites globally due to rising real estate costs. In its fourth-quarter earnings report, Google said it will be forced to contend with more than $500 million (£415 million) in office-related costs during the current quarter.

Recent reports also showed that the firm is set to terminate leases at a “number of unoccupied spaces” in the San Francisco area.

Google isn’t alone in reducing its office footprint, however. Rising costs have prompted several tech companies to re-assess their occupation of physical office spaces, including GitHub.

Earlier this month, the company confirmed it was shifting to a fully remote policy for its global workforce. CEO Thomas Dohmke told staff that the company will close all of its offices once leases expire.

Details on the timeline of this new policy are yet to be revealed by the firm. However, it is expected that sites located in both the US and Netherlands could close.

This downsizing trend is expected to continue throughout 2023, analysis shows, as businesses contend with rising expenditures and a reluctance among workforces to return to a pre-pandemic work model.

Research from Bloomberg Intelligence last week found that London businesses, for example, are drastically shrinking their office footprints and abandoning leases.

In a survey of 500 London businesses, one-quarter of respondents said they are currently in the process of downsizing office holdings while an additional 18% said they are exploring co-working or flexible office options.

Amazon employees have reportedly launched an internal campaign to reverse the CEO's decision mandating a worldwide return to office push.

Corporate employees have formed a channel on the company’s Slack to argue for continued remote work. In it, a petition has been shared claiming that the new office policy “runs contrary” to the company’s promises.

CNBC reported that more than 14,000 had joined this channel by 21 February, a growing fraction of the roughly 300,000 global employees affected by the shift in stance on remote work.

Andy Jassy, CEO at Amazon, announced on 17 February that all Amazon corporate staff would be expected to return to the office at least three days per week effective from 1 May.

Dismayed employees have pointed to a 2021 commitment made by Jassy to continue remote working, and an acknowledgement that "no one-size-fits-all approach for how every team works best" when it comes to work patterns within the company.

Explaining the change in stance, Jassy said that leaders can more effectively teach staff when they’re in the same room, and that in-person meetings are a better way for employees to become immersed in the company culture.

“It’s not simple to bring many thousands of employees back to our offices around the world, so we’re going to give the teams that need to do that work some time to develop a plan,” Jassy wrote in a message to Amazon employees.

“We know that it won’t be perfect at first, but the office experience will steadily improve over the coming months and years) as our real estate and facilities teams smooth out the wrinkles, and ultimately keep evolving how we want our offices to be set up to capture the new ways we want to work.”

Reports have suggested that details on the return to office are still being finalised, including how it can apply uniformly across departments like human resources and software engineering.

Pragmatic Engineering’s Gergely Orosz cited discussions with insiders who stated that employees, managers, and human resources were surprised by the announcement and questioned its absence from the firm's recent all hands meeting.

The change in remote work allowances follows Amazon’s laying off of 18,000 staff, citing an uncertain economic climate and a need to preserve the long-term health of the company.

It also comes as the company approaches the first anniversary of the formation of Amazon Labour Union (ALU), the first such organised group of Amazon warehouse workers.

What’s happening in big tech?

Tech workers have long been the beneficiaries of policies such as remote work, and during the pandemic companies allowed a growing number of employees to move away from the office full-time. Since then, these promises have been slowly reneged, amid wider cuts to workforce numbers and hiring goals.

Twitter, which was among the first to tell employees to work from home indefinitely, has since mandated staff return to offices and decimated their benefits, while in leaked audio obtained by ABC News, CEO Elon Musk was heard to say “if you can show up at an office and you do not show up at the office: resignation accepted. End of story".

But while big tech layoffs appear locked into most corporate strategies at the moment, wisdom on remote working has differed, and some have argued that turning back the clock on hybrid work is a mistake.

Earlier in February, GitHub announced it would go fully remote in the same breath as announcing that 10% of its workforce would be fired.

In November, LinkedIn’s Global Talent Trends report noted that employers are posting fewer remote job positions, even as demand for remote jobs has increased.

The UK's six-month trial examining a four-day working week has yielded positive results, with 92% of firms choosing to retain the structure.

Among the most notable improvements across the companies involved in the trial were better staff health, overall happiness, and increased productivity.

The results showed a clear improvement in employee working conditions before and after the trial was implemented. Burnout fell by 71% and sick days by 65%, with almost half of the employees having reported a reduction in fatigue.

Companies also marked a reduction in churn, with a 57% drop in staff resignations across the trial compared to a comparison period of equal length.

The vast majority of employees indicated that they preferred the four-day schedule, and 15% stated that no amount of money could convince them to return to a five-day week.

60% of respondents also indicated that they were more able to combine their work and care responsibilities under a four-day week, while 62% said they could balance their work and social lives better. Revenue in participating companies remained largely unchanged, rising 1.4% on an average weighted by company size.

“This is a major breakthrough moment for the movement towards a four-day working week,” said Joe Ryle, director of the 4 Day Week Campaign

“Across a wide variety of different sectors of the economy, these incredible results show that the four-day week with no loss of pay really works. Surely the time has now come to begin rolling it out across the country.”

The study was the world’s largest looking at four-day working weeks and gathered results from 61 companies and more than 2,900 workers around the UK. 56 of these firms have chosen to continue with the work structure, with 18 confirming this is a permanent change.

Different types of companies took part in the trial across a range of sectors including financial and tech services, online retail, telecommunications, and food and beverage.

The trial also included a range of company sizes and strategies, to demonstrate the effects of the 32-hour week on as wide a pool of employees as possible.

The UK's four-day week trial in full

The trial, which began in June 2022 and ran until December of the same year, was run by progressive research organisation Autonomy in collaboration with 4 Day Week Global, the 4 Day Week UK Campaign, Boston College, and the University of Cambridge.

The full methodology and in-depth trial results were published by Autonomy in a paper, which also includes anonymised testimonies from business leaders.

The trial ran on the agreement that companies would pay employees 100% of their pay, for 80% of their time, and for 100% of their productivity. The majority of companies sought to implement the change to their working week with no reduction in output, and interviewed workers indicated that the loss of one day per week was its own incentive to work harder on the remaining four.

Some companies made employees sign agreements to maintain their productivity as a condition of the change, and brought in new methods such as holding meetings less regularly, automating some processes, and using new IT management software.

Autonomy reported that only two of the companies interviewed had taken to further recruitment to maintain productivity alongside their four-day week.

At the halfway point of the trial in September, 95% of participating organisations said productivity had maintained or improved. In 2019 Microsoft ran a four-day week trial in its Japan offices, and saw a subsequent 40% rise in productivity.

The trial accounted for a range of different four-day week structures, so long as pay remained at 100%. This allowed the four-day week to be adopted by companies across a range of industries and company cultures.

These included ‘fifth-day stoppage’ in which companies would cease operations for one day per week, a staggered approach in which two or more groups of staff took alternating days off, and a decentralised model in which the week structure varied by department.

Some companies that operate seasonally also worked the four-day week as an annualised average of 32 hours per week, in which staff worked longer opening hours during the ‘on’ season and shorter hours in the ‘off’ season with no loss of pay.

A small number of technology companies are already accredited with the 4 Day Week campaign, and more could follow in the wake of the successful results. Flexible work has long been a touted benefit of working in the tech industry.

Unlike other benefits, the four-day week could weather economic hardship, as employers actually stand to save money if the scheme is properly implemented.

It has been suggested that workers coming into an office for one fewer day per week could slash businesses’ energy bills, and if implemented on a widespread basis could reduce carbon emissions produced by commuters.

“The method of this pilot allowed our researchers to go beyond surveys and look in detail at how the companies were making things work on the ground,” said Dr David Frayne, research associate at the University of Cambridge.

“We feel really encouraged by the results, which showed the many ways companies were turning the four-day week from a dream into a realistic policy, with multiple benefits. We think there is a lot here that ought to motivate other companies and industries to give it a try”.

Three years after the pandemic began, some companies are already looking to turn back the clock on hybrid work. Many employers, including a surprising number in Silicon Valley, have been keen to get workers back into the office, even while COVID-19 continued to range.

Google, for example, warned in early 2021 that hybrid work could harm its corporate culture, before performing a u-turn and approving the majority of requests to work remotely. Netflix boss Reed Hastings, similarly, once claimed he saw no positives in remote working.

Most recently, Elon Musk scrapped Twitter’s ‘work from anywhere’ policy and went so far as to install beds in its headquarters. Harking back to the past in this way and reneging on the promises of freedom and flexibility that came with remote work would be a mistake, with workers more empowered than ever to vote with their feet and seek the flexibility they crave elsewhere.

Losing out on remote working gains

Despite productivity climbing as much as 40% during the pandemic, when remote work was rife, these benefits might have gone over the heads of many. For some, any gains would have been simply absorbed by the economic hardship inflicted by COVID-19, while in more recent times these gains will have gone on to plug the financial woes caused by the cost of living crisis and surging inflation.

As anxieties grow, more traditionalist business leaders might even associate weakening financial performance within their companies with the rise of flexible working. This would, of course, be a false conclusion to draw. It might also be further exacerbated by leaders who find it hard to adapt and want to reflexively return to an age when things were far more straightforward.

Now, however, workers have had a taste of the golden apple, and forcing them to work from the office isn’t going to help anybody. Times have changed and it’s become part of the evolving fabric of work, much like upgrading from an ageing operating system to Windows 11.

The key difference is it’s a cultural change that’s still being worked through – with benefits less clear and harder to measure. Nevertheless, some businesses continue to push for more office-based work, using reasons like “collaboration”, despite a rampant expansion of digital collaboration tools during COVID-19.

Why turning back the clock is a mistake

When the nine-to-five was the norm, employees will have accepted this given the lack of choice. Although employers might not have felt the productivity gains, employees certainly have, in addition to more flexibility and added benefits. By mandating a return to the office, you are asking workers to return to:

• Commuting, which will cost time and money
• Spending less time with their families
• Living in high-rent areas (presumably closer to the business)
• Foraging for overpriced sandwiches at lunch rather than having access to a full kitchen

Workers will be more empowered than ever now to vote with their feet, should their organisation withdraw the benefit. Indeed, 27% of male and 35% of female workers would search for a new role if their employer asked them to return to the office. This might particularly sting in the context of labour shortages.

With desperation in the air, could rowing back on remote work also be some kind of show of strength for investors? Shares in Google, for example, went up by 4% in the wake of news it took the tough decision to let go 12,000 workers. Executives who wander into the territory of tweaking working arrangements should take heed of how much employees – including highly skilled workers – value their newfound flexibility. This trend, if left unchecked, could weaken the foundations of a company.

Collaborating to define the future of hybrid work

This return to the past, particularly in the tech industry, also coincides with mass layoffs, including at Amazon and Salesforce alongside Microsoft and other major names. For executives who favour the previous status quo, what's stopping them from exploiting the leverage they’ve gained given the recent wave of redundancies – and an increasingly competitive job market – to enforce unpopular policies around hybrid work? For that reason, and others, it’s incidentally never been a better time for tech workers to unionise.

Instead of slashing remote work policies, businesses should be refining them – alongside workers and trade unions – to make sure they work for everyone. The International Labour Organisation (ILO), for example, recently found remote working helps prevent job losses and works to maintain employment levels. Flexible working also need regulating to mitigate any negative effects, as well as give workers a “right to disconnect”. There’s a higher danger of burnout and reduced productivity if employees don’t exercise this right. Plus, not all hybrid work policies are equal, with some organisations creating two or more tiers of workers who could be treated differently, be expected to perform different duties, or might even be paid differently.

This could also be a great time for companies to downsize their offices and make sizeable savings. Should more businesses embrace this cultural shift, it could transform the way cities and business hubs are structured. Some floors of office buildings will be retained, for instance, but others might be converted into retail space, or even much-needed housing. Businesses could grasp this opportunity to be a part of a reimagination of cities and office spaces – or they could risk being left behind.

Innovations have helped businesses enormously, and it's giving workers more freedom to work from anywhere. This isn’t a bad thing, and just because we used to work a certain way – and things seemed to work just fine on a surface level – that doesn’t mean we need to revert to those norms when times get tough. Perhaps, once we’ve come to appreciate the impact technology has made on our professional lives, employers might begin seriously entertaining even more radical ideas like the four-day week.

Microsoft is giving workers in the US unlimited time off, joining other tech giants in introducing the rare employee benefit.

Employees were made aware of the change to their paid time off when Kathleen Hogan, the tech giant’s chief people officer, sent them a memo on 11 January, according to The Verge. The change will apply to US employees, although it won’t apply to hourly workers.

The change, dubbed 'Discretionary Time Off' by the tech giant, will begin on 16 January and will also apply to new employees.

Additionally, the company will give employees ten corporate holidays, as well as sick leave, leaves of absence, and mental health time off.

Employees who haven’t used up all their holiday days will get a one-time payment in April.

“How, when, and where we do our jobs has dramatically changed,” said Hogan. “And as we’ve transformed, modernising our vacation policy to a more flexible model was a natural next step.”

It’s unclear whether this change will be made available to employees outside of the US in the future, although the tech giant said staff outside the US will keep their current holiday benefits due to different laws in other countries. It also said federal and state wage and hour laws make it difficult to offer unlimited time off to hourly workers.

“Beginning January 16, 2023, Microsoft is modernising our vacation policy to a more flexible model and transitioning to Discretionary Time Off (DTO)," a Microsoft spokesperson told IT Pro. "How, when, and where employees do their jobs has dramatically changed and DTO aligns with more flexible ways of working.”

The spokesperson added that the initiative doesn't apply to the UK.

Microsoft joins companies like Oracle, LinkedIn, and Salesforce which also offer unlimited time off for staff. In May 2022, Microsoft also almost doubled its budget for employee salary increases. The company was aiming to retain staff and help employees cope with inflation. However, the move was only set to affect early to mid-career workers.

"Organisations who have instituted unlimited PTO approaches have found that organisational fairness and perceptions of trust in the organisation can be negatively impacted," Augustus Vickery, senior principal at Gartner HR Practice told IT Pro. "Employees know that PTO cannot really be ‘unlimited’, and the ability to take PTO is instead dependent on a range of factors to do with their job, workload, team culture and manager.

"Removing the set allowance of PTO days can result in employees taking less time off overall and increase discrepancies between employees in the PTO they are able to take," said Vickery.

50% of workers in the US would prefer to have unlimited time off compared to earning a higher salary, according to a survey of 2,000 workers by Fortune. In March 2022, only 9% of workers in the US had access to the employee benefit.

In 2019, Hiring Lab found that job postings advertising unlimited holiday time rose 178% between 2015 to 2019, from 450 postings per million to 1,300 postings per million. Tech roles, like data scientists or software engineers, are also six-to-eight times more likely to be offered this benefit than other jobs.

Nearly three in four employees feel positive about unlimited paid time off, with 82.1% of those who already enjoyed the benefits feeling positive about it, according to research from Joblist from March 2022.

However, in the US, in the year before the research was published, employees took an average of 11 paid days off work, one more day than what’s considered to be the minimum vacation time of two weeks in the country.

HP has unveiled a suite of new PCs at CES 2023 designed to bring innovative new features to benefit hybrid working environments.

Chief among the new features is a new 'multi-camera experience' designed to offer dual video streams and camera switching to help users easily show their faces and an object or whiteboard at the same time, side-by-side or picture-in-picture. HP said the new devices are the first business notebooks to support the simultaneous use of two cameras.

The catalogue of launches sporting the new hybrid work features includes the HP Dragonfly G4, HP EliteBook 1040 G10, and the HP Elite x360 1040 G10 - all of which come equipped with Intel 13th Gen processors, and varying screen sizes between 13.5 and 14 inches.

The company has also added a feature called 'auto camera select' which uses face tracking to detect which camera a user is facing to help keep audiences engaged without having to change the settings manually on their device if they happen to change which camera they use.

HP Keystone Correction helps to share whiteboards or documents by automatically cropping and flattening images from the camera feed. There’s also the HP Be Right Back feature which users can utilise to change their video feed to an image without disrupting their meetings if they need a break.

Smart Sense is also baked in, a feature HP claims will optimise PC thermal performance using AI to adapt to PC usage patterns. The ambition here is that the feature will help to make the devices run quieter and cooler, making them more comfortable to work with.

Through research, the company said that 77% of employees prefer a hybrid model, with this form of working here to stay, although working in a hybrid environment can be challenging.

It added that workers need to have productive workspaces at home, and need the best PC experience wherever they work.

“Hybrid provides us with greater flexibility and freedom in our personal lives, but brings its own set of challenges for people to stay productive and connected to others,” said Alex Cho, president of personal systems at HP.

HP also unveiled two other devices that it hopes will reduce friction in users’ lives through their all-day battery life and powerful camera and touchscreen, in turn supporting the rise in hybrid working.

The first PC is the Dragonfly Pro Chromebook which has been made for users who require continuous, uninterrupted connection to the internet.

The Dragonfly Pro Chromebook is a 14in device with what HP claims to be the first 8MP user-facing camera in a clamshell Chromebook, with the world’s brightest Chromebook touchscreen display.

The second piece of hardware is the HP Dragonfly Pro which the company produced in partnership with AMD. It's been branded the first HP device to have one-touch access to HP 24/7 live concierge support through one of its hotkeys. The other hotkeys are for Control Center access, and the camera, while the fourth one can be customised.

Both of these devices are EPEAT Gold Registered in the US, using ten recycled metals and plastics as well as sustainably sourced and recycled packaging.

HP also said the freelancer community is expected to grow, with freelancers making up 50% of the US workforce by 2027. This is why it has released these two laptops, targeting freelancers who need power for multitasking and heavy workloads, as well as built-in support and services.

Big changes over the last few years have fundamentally transformed the way organisations operate. The scale and nature of workplace transformation has shifted, with more emphasis on accommodating all employees regardless of where they work. Most, if not all, agree further change is on the horizon, but this process must be handled correctly, as rushing any workplace transformation, or failing to understand the specific reason for the change, can cause serious and long-lasting issues.

Indeed, hurrying downsizing, remodelling or the rollout of a hybrid work strategy can end up costing more time, money, and efficiency in the long term if all eventualities aren’t accounted for, and each stakeholder isn’t consulted and engaged up front.

Organisations planning to undergo a workplace transformation in the coming months must fully understand the needs of their workforce, as well as considering elements such as data demands and information security. It’s also important to build relationships with experts, rather than going it alone, as this added guidance enables you to deliver on digital transformation projects in the most successful and efficient way possible.

Assessing the scale of the challenge

Making changes to workspace configuration and implementing a hybrid work strategy, are higher priorities for global enterprises, according to research Iron Mountain has conducted with Economist Impact, the research arm of The Economist. The majority (61.2%) of organisations also say their employee engagement demands significant, much or some improvement. Such changes must come hand-in-hand with digital transformation goals and activities. These are both key pillars in the mission to raise resilience. Indeed, 79.1% of executives surveyed agreed that managing physical work locations was important in fostering long-term resilience, while just over half are changing their approach in order to invest in flexible workspaces that can be adapted to workplace needs post-pandemic.

Despite this widespread enthusiasm for business change and digital transformation, sheer willpower isn’t enough to see these ambitions through. Regardless of industry there are several guiding principles that must be followed in order to appreciate the scale and nature of the challenge. These will be unique to each organisation but there are also commonalities such as the desire to reduce costs, increase productivity, and guarantee an improvement in employee wellbeing.

Building a workspace for the future

Although COVID-19 gave rise to a dramatic increase in remote working – which has permeated into enterprise culture now that we have learned to live with the impact of the pandemic – some people still yearn to come into the office. Regardless of whether employees are planning to come in five days a week, or once a fortnight, focusing on modernising that physical space is key to raising their morale and productivity. It’s more likely than not, therefore, that an office that’s been untouched since before the pandemic is not fit for the modern age.

Before organisations begin ripping out desks and filing cabinets, they must first think strategically and – with the guidance of expert consultants – evaluate the needs of their unique workforce. Businesses should take an inventory of all physical and digital environments to ensure their purpose is clear, and eliminate any inefficiencies that exist. Identifying gaps in manual or digital processes, any access needs or security holes, are good first steps.

Although the physical space is important, there’s a lot more that goes on behind the scenes that needs to be addressed. Data protection and the way the enterprise safeguards its assets in the age of hybrid work, are paramount. This not only spans personal information the organisation might hold in records and documents, and that workers need to access, but the distribution and management of physical devices like laptops. When undergoing a radical business transformation such as this, success hinges on staying on top of each and every aspect. This can be overwhelming without expert assistance to ensure the process means your business is as resilient as it can possibly be.

It’s vital to ensure that key stakeholders, such as corporate real estate, security, records and information management are included in the decision making process. Each brings an important perspective to planning your workplace transformation. By ensuring clear and transparent communication between the relevant parties, you can ensure transformation that suits everyone and best serves the needs of your business.

Starting afresh

Amid the myriad considerations that organisations must take when undergoing any business transformation, leaning on a trusted vendor like Iron Mountain and its Clean Start® solution will give business leaders the confidence and assurance to know they are on the right path. An Iron Mountain Clean Start assessment, conducted by a team of experts, can guide enterprises through key risk and opportunity areas of a workplace reconfiguration.

Iron Mountain Clean Start comprises several components including secure storage, secure destruction and digital transformation, with a multi-pronged approach ensuring organisations are covered across the board. Using Clean Start can help you optimise your office footprint, cut costs, clean out physical and digital spaces, and maximise the efficient use of assets and space. Often enough, such a workplace transformation comes hand-in-hand with digital transformation projects.

The age of hybrid working means many organisations have seen the sands shift beneath their feet, meaning they need to react at pace and with decisiveness in order to stay competitive. Ensuring any transformation is reinforced with expert guidance at every stage is essential to guaranteeing your agility, flexibility and resilience in the future.

The rude awakening of a "once in a century" pandemic caused us to re-evaluate how we do business. The acceleration in home working – “telecommuting” as it used to be known – allowed businesses to continue to function, more or less, in a way simply not possible if COVID-19 had hit 20 years earlier.

Indeed, in today's age, platforms like Microsoft Teams, Google Meet and Zoom were elevated to essential business tools. As we emerge into a new reality, organisations have re-evaluated the 40-hour, office-bound work paradigm in favour of flexible hybrid work arrangements. Some organisations are also pushing this new reality to new limits, breathing life and energy into the idea of hybrid work.

Let's work from the pub

With home working now fully embedded in the psyche of employees and many reluctant employers, we’re currently in a period of flux. Although some stricter organisations have called time on remote working altogether, others are embracing change and allowing their staff to roam free.

One burgeoning alternative created by the pandemic is the 'Work from Pub' model. The idea of booking a table at your local for the day, with an all-in price for Wi-Fi, tea and coffee and sometimes a pint at the end was spotted in enterprising pubs and bars as early as 2015, but as we emerge from lockdown, licensees have seized on it as a way to lure people back, offering a tempting alternative to working in an empty flat.

Brewery and pub chain Youngs first adopted the idea at a corporate level and now offers “work from pub” at selected branches. “For those working remotely, Young’s first introduced its ‘Work from Pub’ bookings across select pubs back in October 2020, which, at the start, was launched to accommodate guests who needed a space away from the four walls of home," a spokesperson explains. "The initiative was a great way for our pubs to host guests throughout the day, especially during the uncertainty of the pandemic, and it proved successful among customers, with many pubs still offering this option"

Dumping the office for good

But what about the companies that have gone above and beyond the simple hybrid working model? One graphic design agency in London, for example, decided during the course of lockdown that offices weren’t a necessity at all. Many businesses have followed similar thinking, reducing the size of the office spaces they used to occupy or ditching physical workspaces altogether to cut costs.

In the case of our graphic design agency, they cancelled their lease and switched to a complete remote model. They used the savings to fit out a houseboat that acts as a meeting room and a perk for staff to borrow at the weekend – with the added bonus that it can be dragged to where it’s needed.

Making the office more tempting

On the flip side, education tech firm Epignosis created a cleaner, greener working environment to entice staff to come in – as well as to show off to their clients. Their “jungle meeting rooms” are now covered in wall-to-wall plants, which not only look cool, but actually improve the quality of the air.

If you’ve ever felt drowsy during meetings, there’s a good chance that it’s because you and your colleagues are expelling so much carbon dioxide as you breathe that the air is becoming stale. Perhaps “jungles” may seem extreme, but plants can be a powerful weapon in keeping employees productive.

Après work?

Flexible working has also meant that boundaries between work life and personal life have blurred. Often, this is seen as a disadvantage, but it does have its upsides.

During the course of researching this piece, IT Pro heard from one employee who has managed to hold down a full-time job while travelling the world. She regularly remotes in from internet cafés at the tops of mountains and then when the work is done, skis home. The change in the way we work can actually facilitate a better work-life balance. The challenge for both companies and employees is to set boundaries, to ensure that freedom doesn’t blur with a culture of being always available.

Work and see the world

Of course, many freelancers are used to working from everywhere and anywhere – often catching up with work from the beach. When it comes to the dreaded business trip or overseas conference, though, companies are increasingly giving their employees the opportunity to actually see the place they’re visiting.

The Fox Agency allows workers to extend their stay in exotic climates. "Ultimately the team can work from anywhere with an internet connection," a spokesperson explains. "We’ve had and continue to have colleagues working from Sicily, Egypt, Brazil, Portugal, Miami, et cetera – using annual leave to enjoy the sights but also extending their time in these countries knowing that they can work from anywhere – and why wouldn’t you want to work in the sun with your feet in the sand?"

Lockdown drills as training

In some cases, the experience of lockdown has been turned into a learning experience, not to be forgotten, but actually repeated to improve how companies function together. Zengenti, a CMS provider, tells IT Pro how it simulates lockdowns as training exercises to practise, perfect and enhance the experience of remote working.

Although nobody hopes to a return to lockdowns for real, it’s an interesting reminder that the events of the last two years can be turned into a positive. This, as Zengenti explains, encourages the business to “think outside of the box, work as a team, work with others outside of your department and to build relationships in a 'controlled'/focused lockdown-type environment”.

“We’ve seen some awesome ‘lockdown’ events at the Zengenti office; from renovating the office’s basement into a games and film room and building a barbecue, to working on software-based projects like integrating third-party applications," a spokesperson says.

“In the build-up to the two-day event, people start thinking about project ideas. After we announce the date, we organise a company-wide meeting for people to brainstorm together. Agreed ideas are published via Slack, budgets are then finalised and any pre-event spending takes place. The event starts with a briefing – the team is fed throughout the two days - and the event ends with team presentations and an award ceremony."

This is a timely reminder that humans learn and evolve. If we forget everything COVID-19 taught us, then it can feel begin to like two wasted years when, in fact, it's kickstarted a workplace revolution.

What many refer to as the ‘great resignation’ means employers are fishing in an ever-decreasing talent pool, with the ongoing skills crisis also adding pressure.

Employment packages may have previously included company cars, healthcare plans, pensions, sabbaticals and the infamous ‘casual Friday’. COVID-19 forced employers to rethink their approach to organising their workforce. The pandemic forced workers, too, to re-evaluate their priorities, as hybrid work emerged as a major trend.

In today’s landscape, technology is essential for staying connected to coworkers and collaborating, which is why employers are ditching the perks of old and increasingly throwing all kinds of hardware and services into the incentives pot – from shiny new business laptops to paid-for broadband bills. Amid businesses vying to attract the most talented individuals, this is a trend many organisations are employing to stay ahead of the curve.

Tech perks vs tech necessities

For most workers, a hybrid approach to work is the preferred option, but there are implications. Since the pandemic, for instance, many have been onboarded without setting foot in an office, while others say they’ll quit if forced to return to a physical workplace. Providing the right technology, therefore, is increasingly important.

“For some staff, a powerful device on offer is part of their consideration as to whether they should join a company,” says Howard Lewis, Surface business group lead at Microsoft UK. But there’s some difference of opinion, Lewis admits, on whether tech provision is a perk or merely a tool of the trade. “Some view it in the same manner as a company car,” Lewis adds, while “others view a powerful device as the bare minimum for getting their work done”.

Whether it’s a perk or necessity, there’s little doubt that tech provision makes a difference when employees decide who to work for. Employees, too, have upped their expectations in the last couple of years. The devices that got them through the pandemic don’t fit the demands of a longer-term, hybrid future, where a lot of work will be done on the go. Whether it’s in the form of sheer power, the form factor, portability or functionality, employees want more from their work-issued hardware – so what can companies realistically offer?

The devices powering hybrid work

Connectivity and portability are essential components of hybrid working. According to a report by Intel – which let’s not forget has skin in this game – employers are likely to look to 5G-enabled laptops for greater security than letting employees rely on open Wi-Fi networks. Dual-screen devices are also popular, according to both Intel and Microsoft, with the latter saying they offer “the agility and flexibility needed for hybrid working”.

Others, including specific industries, will favour a Mac for hybrid working. “Many of our bread-and-butter customers are creative marketing and design agencies that have historically been Mac-orientated,” says James Godfrey, managing director of Lease Loop, a company that leases Apple hardware. He describes the popularity of Apple devices as “the magpie effect”, with everybody flocking to a new, shiny device Apple might be talking about. The most popular leased device since COVID-19 started is the MacBook Pro 13in, he adds.

As important as the devices are, employees expect the digital experience to match what they’re used to with consumer devices. Most people have tablets and smartphones for personal use, which are easy to operate; they expect the same from their work systems, according to Applaud HR research, with a report suggesting there are widespread expectations for work tech to perform on par with the most popular consumer apps.

Likewise, Godfrey believes it’s vital for IT departments to deliver “zero-touch deployment” so employees receive devices with pre-populated apps that work out of the box. Factors like single sign-on (SSO), and giving employees the right software and the best collaboration tools are important. Simpler interfaces also reduce some of the anxiety around platform choices, he adds. “Since the prevalence of the iPhone and iPad in the home environment, and the advent of Microsoft Surface, the fear factor of moving from Mac to PC is diminishing because of the intuitive way you move around those systems.”

Giving employees the freedom to choose

Perhaps the greatest perk is the ability for employees to choose their hardware. Nine out of ten employees would take a pay cut to secure their device of choice, according to Jamf, with people more likely to join a company if it offers them a technology choice.

Sarah Whitman, senior vice president and head of global e-commerce at employee reward company, Workhuman, agrees. “Workhuman works with hundreds of companies all over the world who are looking to understand what perks, benefits, and rewards employees are looking for – especially now, considering the ongoing talent crisis and consequent battle to attract and retain top talent. We’ve found that when it comes to the most appealing tech perks, the ability to choose is key.”

Andrew Hewitt, a senior analyst for Forrester Research, agrees a choice of device is likely to be a differentiating factor for prospective employees. “If someone is deciding between Company A versus company B, and Company B provides $1,500 to get fully set up and I can choose my device, that’s going to be more attractive than a corporate PC that restricts what I can do,” he says.

There’s a disconnect, however, between employers, who believe they’re quite flexible, and workers on the ground, who feel their choices are being restricted. A majority (84%) of IT decision makers say employees can choose a different form factor, according to Forrester, with 79% saying employees can upgrade devices. However, only half of the employees agree with the statement. This can lead to disgruntled employees, with over half surveyed agreeing their PCs are out-of-date or insufficient.

Kitting out the home office

Employees would expect their companies to kit out their desk at work, but the shift to home-working means they’re also looking for their employers to augment their home office setups. “Prior to 2020, you’d put up with some of the negative consequences of homeworking,” says Hewitt. “So, maybe I need to pay for the internet bill or invest to ensure I have a comfortable office.” He adds employees often felt organisations make an exception for remote working, so these are added costs the employee should cover. This has eroded, and it’s now a question of how well employers support remote work.

It’s not only the laptops that staff demand, but the accessories that go with them. IT decision makers believe accessories are essential – top of the wishlist are wireless headphones, a monitor, an additional keyboard and an external mouse, according to Microsoft. “This provision of a broader ‘day-one kit’ should now be considered for existing staff, when refreshing devices and when onboarding new staff,” Microsoft’s report states. A separate Lenovo report, meanwhile, states most IT decision makers say their company will cover the cost for most technology devices needed or wanted by employees.

Don’t necessarily expect that to extend to your broadband connection, however. Lockdown prompted some employers to cover broadband costs, but that’s far from common practice, according to Alex Bloor, general manager at ISP Andrews & Arnold. “Lots of companies during the lockdown put decent broadband into their employees’ homes so they could work more efficiently,” he says. “However, it was rare for people not to have broadband already. They did it because of support – so that one ISP could support all their employees internally. I find it hard to see it as a perk in the traditional sense.”

Tech satisfaction means career satisfaction

When technology doesn’t live up to expectations, employee productivity and wellbeing can suffer – and some employees are switching jobs as a result. According to NexThink research, 77% of HR and IT leaders think poor or unreliable IT services and equipment play a role in employee burnout or turnover.

A failure to invest also means employees will go elsewhere, according to Applaud HR, with the gap between organisations prioritising the digital experience and those not doing so widening. While many employers have embraced the new normal, others are silently waiting for things to go back to the way they were, Applaud HR’s report suggests. This is already having a profound impact on staff retention, productivity, and wellbeing.

“If things go awry, you start having significant issues,” Hewitt agrees. “People start to say, I can’t get my job done because the technology is suffering. Several clients have said that they’ve heard in their exit interviews that people are leaving because the technology doesn’t enable them to be successful.”

With technology proving ever more critical to recruitment and retention, employers are also investing in skills to enhance the digital experience. By 2025, half of IT organisations will have established a digital employee experience strategy, team and management tool, a significant increase from 5% in 2021, according to Gartner.

Companies must also upskill staff to help them take advantage of sleeker tools, says Multiverse, a startup that works with businesses to offer apprenticeships to young adults and those looking to reskill. “The fastest-growing areas of our economy are data, tech and digital skills,” says Jeremy Duggan, president at Multiverse. “One of the best things companies can do to support their people right now is to provide fully-funded training in these areas – giving their people the ability to own their career progression in high-demand areas.”

The message is clear. If employers want to retain their staff and attract the skilled workers they need, they need to give them the tools – both hardware and soft skills – to do it.

New data revealed that companies are posting fewer remote job positions although the demand for them has increased.

Fully remote job postings reached an all-time high in February 2022 comprising 20% of all listings but attracting 50% of the total number of job applications, according to LinkedIn’s October 2022 Global Talent Trends report.

By September this year, employers scaled back remote job posting to 14% of all posts on the platform but these still attracted 52% of all site-wide applications in the US.

Remote jobs also continue to be popular around the rest of the world, LinkedIn said. In the UK, 9% of posts were for remote jobs and they received 20% of all applications.

Simialr findings were made in Germany - 9% of the job postings were remote positions and they attracted 22% of all applications. India's fully remote job postings stood at 10%, attracting 21% of all applications for them on the site.

LinkedIn also underlined that candidates continue to highly rank three priorities that came about as a result of the pandemic: a work-life balance, flexible work arrangements, and upskilling. These three were only beaten by compensation as the top priority candidates have, as of August 2022.

“Even facing an uncertain future, people still highly value two areas of work life that have gotten a lot of attention since the start of the pandemic: work-life balance, and flexible-work arrangements – including remote work. I expect those two attributes to remain top talent drivers for years to come,” said Jennifer Shappley, VP of global talent acquisition at LinkedIn.

Additionally, LinkedIn also found that hiring is levelling off after historic highs, and discovered that the hiring rate in a sample of 14 countries has decreased in all of them in the past year. In the US, hiring has gone down 13%, in the UK it has decreased by 11%, while in India it has decreased by 18%.

“This year we are seeing a slower pace of growth, as the economy comes back down to earth after a meteoric rise last year in one of the fastest recoveries we have ever seen,” said Karin Kimbrough, chief economist at LinkedIn.

“Nevertheless, labour-market dynamics remain tight. So, in many ways, employees still hold the power to demand more from their employers when it comes to salary, flexibility, and benefits. But this power balance is likely to start levelling out in the coming months.”

The report also found that workers are bracing for an economic downturn. LinkedIn’s Workforce Confidence Index measured eight countries’ candidates’ and employees’ confidence in their ability to better their financial situation, which has decreased or remains low.

The point change from January to August 2022 was -3 for Japan, -5 for the US, and -7 for Germany. The UK came last with -10. However, France ranked 0, Australia +2 and the Netherlands ranked +1.

Employees continuing to prioritise remote working positions comes as some companies have been attempting to usher their workers back to the office.

In May 2022, the widespread return-to-office efforts caused a former Apple executive to join rival Alphabet after he left the company because of its strict return-to-work policy.

Ian Goodfellow previously oversaw machine learning and artificial intelligence at Apple and reportedly left the company due to a lack of flexibility in its workplace policies.

Logitech has launched its new Sight meeting-room camera to tackle the issue of remote workers feeling disengaged from meetings held in hybrid work environments.

Sight is a desk-based camera that takes the form of a tower slightly larger than a water bottle. It has AI functionality to automatically pan across the individual in the physical meeting room who is speaking.

It's equipped with two 4K cameras on either side of the tower that combine to take in a 315-degree view of the meeting room, working in tandem with the fixed-position cameras that are already commonplace in meeting rooms.

The tower sits in the middle of the desk and as participants talk, it uses smart audio technology to track and detect sounds which then dictate to whom the camera lenses focus.

Logitech invited IT Pro to experience the camera and with hands-on testing, the camera delivers a far more immersive experience for the remote portion of the meeting than the current 360-degree cameras on the market.

Participants receive both the standard view from the main webcam, but also a close-up of the speaker to increase engagement.

The device can be fitted to a desk - either mounted centrally or with a grommet - or set up using a tripod if the meeting room doesn't have desks.

Sight also has USB and Ethernet ports, and in the future will support daisy chain functionality that will enable a two-device setup that will make larger meetings possible. At present, Sight can accommodate a maximum of eight physical meeting participants.

It's compatible with all the major video conferencing platforms, such as Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, and most operating systems, across PCs, Macs, and mobile.

Meetings have drastically changed since the pandemic, with most companies now a mix of in-office and remote staff. However, the experience of a hybrid meeting isn't consistent for all as the remote participants on a call are often left feeling isolated or too distant to engage.

Occasionally, the issue is the technology within the meeting room itself; hardware that isn't in any way immersive, leaving the remote attending feeling like they're viewing CCTV of someone else's meeting.

The unique idea is the result of an extensive research and development programme. Logitech told IT Pro that it actually scraps more products than it brings to market in its quest for usability and that Sight is an evolution of that extensive work and its wider webcam portfolio.

At this time, there isn't a specific release date as the company wants to release it to testing partners in order to iron out any potential bugs before launching sometime in the summer of 2023.

The product will come in either graphite or white and will cost $1,999 (£1,745) including VAT. UK pricing will be revealed closer to the release date.

An Australian senate committee has recommended that workers in the country should have a right to disconnect.

The Select Committee on Work and Care made the recommendation to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations on 19 October as part of an enquiry into the impact that combining work and care responsibilities has on the wellbeing of workers, carers, and those they care for.

It found that the changing ways of work in recent years with the advancement of technology has caused an “availability creep”, where employees feel they need to be available all the time to answer emails, calls, or deal with their workload. This has only been exacerbated by the pandemic, impacting productivity, increasing work-life stress, and taking workers away from a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, added the committee.

The new way of working particularly affects workers aiming to balance paid work and unpaid care, and who work from home, and means that people balancing work and care are even less likely to get a break from these responsibilities.

A right to disconnect, already in place in a number of European countries, would dictate at what times workers can be contacted by their employer, and provide legal protections for those forced to engage outside of their working hours.

The committee pointed out that recent workplace innovations have seen bargaining to contain working hours, and a number of European countries and some employers have moved to establish a right to disconnect from work.

In light of the changes to workplace boundaries following the pandemic, and given the need for working carers to have clear parameters around their working time, the committee recommended that a right to disconnect be considered for Australian workplace relations law.

“Such a right should enable and support productive work from home and flexibility of work, while ensuring workers have the capacity to disconnect from their job and to work their contractual hours,” stated the committee.

The committee made the recommendation to the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, and encouraged it to investigate legislative reforms to the Fair Work Act 2009 and any other associated workplace laws.

The right to disconnect should enable and support productive work from home and flexibility of work as well as protecting the rights of workers to disconnect from their job outside of contracted hours and to enforce this with their employer. Additionally, it should place a positive duty on employers to reasonably accommodate the right wherever possible and allow employees to appeal to the Fair Work Commission where the right is not being enacted by employers.

Which countries have implemented a right to disconnect?

France was the first country in Europe to implement the right to disconnect. In 2013, a national cross-sectoral agreement on quality of life at work stipulated that businesses should avoid any intrusion into employees’ private lives by outlining the times when devices should be turned off, according to Eurofound. In 2016, this was made into a law, now regulated by Article L.2242-17.

Other EU countries have followed in France’s footsteps, with Belgium, Italy, and Spain enacting legislation that has some form of right to disconnect. The European Parliament also passed a resolution in favour of this right in January 2021 and has asked the European Commission to prepare a directive on this matter which will be accompanied by a legislative proposal. The Commission has said it will work on the matter, although hasn’t given itself a specific deadline.

The UK currently doesn’t have a right to disconnect, but ministers were urged by unions in April 2021 to include this policy in upcoming legislation. Prospect, a tech workers union, found that around two-thirds of UK workers wanted this policy put in place. The union said that it would refine blurred boundaries between work and home life and show the government was serious about tackling the dark side of remote working.

The next generation of connectivity is on the horizon, promising to offer lightning fast speeds that will change the way people use their devices. The innovation of 6G isn’t just about speeds, though. The next generation technology will go far beyond 5G’s capabilities, opening the door to multiple use cases difficult to imagine today.

In the business world, 6G will be game-changing for the metaverse, enabling holographic meetings without the need to wear a headset. More broadly, 6G has implications in industrial settings, where it will drastically boost productivity in factories and allow access to machinery even when workers are off-site.

It’s early days yet, but 6G’s possibilities are so vast that Nokia’s CEO Pekka Lundmark predicts the technology could make smartphones obsolete. When 6G arrives in 2030, “the smartphone as we know it today will not be the most common interface,” according to Lundmark, adding “many of these things will be built directly into our bodies”.

Although 6G is at an early research stage, and standards have not been set, the technology’s possibilities are certainly exciting.

What will widespread 6G look like?

The current generation of cellular technology, 5G, offers higher bandwidth and lower latency, enabling use cases including large scale Internet of Things (IoT) and virtual reality (VR). When 6G eventually launches, it is expected to be up to 100 times faster than 5G, at approximately 1,000 Gbit/sec.

Nokia’s 2021 white paper ‘Extreme massive MIMO for macro cell capacity boost in 5G-Advanced and 6G’, details how the mid-spectrum bands hosting 6G networks will provide around 20 times more capacity compared to 5G in the 3.5GHz band.

Beyond speed, 6G will be “a fully integrated system that allows for instantaneous communications between devices, consumers, and the surrounding environment”, says futurist Bernard Marr. He adds 6G-enabled enterprise technologies will “transform the way companies process information, communicate, make decisions, and train employees”.

Taking this into account, 6G use cases include holoportation – described by Microsoft as “3D capture technology that allows high-quality 3D models of people to be reconstructed, compressed and transmitted anywhere in the world in real time” – and large-scale digital twin technology. This could reshape the way people interact with each other at work, says Sylwia Kechiche, principal analyst, enterprise at Ookla.

She paints a picture where meetings are held in virtual spaces, with digital representations of people and connected things. “Such immersive working could enable optimal levels of efficiency and productivity; large amounts of sensors will continuously send information and combine it with contextual data,” she envisages. “This can then be analysed in real-time, simultaneously looking at past events to help with problem solving by recommending the best course of action.”

As 6G rolls out, online experiences should become more powerful, says Jessica Ellis, director in applied 5G at Deloitte. She cites the example of the metaverse. “With such extended reality, users can imagine walking down a virtual high street, witnessing life-like people, entering well-known businesses, and participating in an interactive experience. These advancements will blur the lines between virtual and reality on a scale we can’t quite comprehend right now.”

With 6G becoming widespread, the business world and the way we work, meet up and network will start to change. Online meetings could see a full mobile hologram of the other person beamed into the room, adds Ellis.

Instead of spending hours on 2D Zoom or Teams meetings, people will meet in 3D digital spaces, where avatars will have “real” eye contact and express body language in real-time, says Marr. “If we need to hold a one-to-one meeting, we could simply switch all the participants out, and find a quiet virtual space to connect.”

6G will have the ability to enable hundreds of millions of simultaneous users to access multiple different metaverses in parallel. At the same time, photo-realistic 3D graphics will be rendered “almost instantaneously”, says Rohit Talwar, futurist and CEO at Fast Future. “This means a banking assistant would be able to visualise a client’s entire account history and resolve complex service issues and requirements face-to-face inside a metaverse.”

With the help of 6G, employee training will evolve too via immersive VR and augmented reality (AR) experiences, Marr says.

Mapping the major upgrades between 5G and 6G

5G is already enabling a host of use cases including IoT applications across transportation, healthcare and farming. 6G is set to bolster this even further, resulting in better productivity and efficiency – especially in industrial use cases.

In industrial settings, 6G will enable latency of nano-seconds with adaptive meta-materials, including surfaces that can become part of the network, says David Lessin, director, network operations and research at ISG.

Factories are likely to have more robotics on production lines, and these will be communicating with logistics and entire supply chains, says Ellis. This could lower operational cost and save time, as well as reducing the environmental impact.

Intelligent and autonomous machines enabled by 6G will require fewer people in industrial environments, allowing employees to work remotely, adds Derek Long, head of telecoms and mobile at Cambridge Consultants. “The environment becomes safer as people are moved from the shop floor to control rooms,” he tells IT Pro. “The shop floor can be reconfigured as people are not going to be so involved, and machines will be located more closely together, with production lines designed around efficient flow.”

The vision of a smart city, where all public services are integrated, could also become reality when 6G enters the fray. “Autonomous vehicles could scale – especially emergency services vehicles and logistics for long journeys – with zero risk of drop out,” Ellis predicts.

Meanwhile, 6G will change your commute to work, via real-time, 4D maps to manage extreme traffic in future cities, including autonomous vehicles. “Your journey will improve with the help of highly accurate sensors in vehicles and at base stations that can navigate and give you the fastest, most comfortable commute,” Marr explains.

Multiple verticals will benefit but, in particular, 6G will revolutionise healthcare, Marr continues. “With lightning fast data speeds, we’ll have smart sensors that float through our bloodstream and monitor and measure every aspect of our health. These connected devices will continuously collect data and analyse information to make recommendations and predict health issues before they arise.”

The scale of the predictions are huge, but 6G’s future isn’t set in stone, and nobody knows with certainty what the technology will materially look like when it takes hold from approximately 2030. While 6G could open up multiple doors for businesses and employees, the reality is likely some way off. Indeed, 5G rollout has so far been fairly slow, and many of its use cases are still yet to reach their full potential.

Over half of young tech workers (54%) in Europe are considering a change of career plan while over a third (35%) are unhappy in their role.

Those surveyed under 30 years of age blamed poor management and a clear lack of progression for job dissatisfaction, but there are signs that increasing concern over redundancies is also playing a significant role.

A total of 30% of the 20-30 years olds surveyed said their current job is falling below their expectations and leading to poor job satisfaction, with the younger age bracket, between 20 and 25, being most affected. Only 30% said they would recommend their workplace to friends or family.

The research examined the ambitions and fears of more than 2,000 Gen Z and younger millennial tech workers. Participants were selected from startups and enterprises across France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the UK, including both technical and non-technical roles from engineering to C-Suite positions.

Most workers in the UK, Ireland, and France reported feeling their job doesn’t match expectations, according to the study commissioned by global venture fund Eight Roads. In France, 19% said their job exceeded expectations, while 23% in Ireland and 27% in England said their job exceeded expectations.

However, only 54% of young people in the UK said they planned to stay in their current role this year or for the foreseeable future. According to the researchers, this suggests a looming crisis for the UK economy which has seen the greatest investment in tech and startups in the last decade.

UK findings were also damning when it came to career development. One in five young people in UK tech said they have no clear career path where they currently work, one in ten say their current company does not support their career development, and almost one in three would join a company that provided more concrete support for their career.

Measures which would encourage the unhappy employees to stay in their roles included better career progression (37%), an increase in salary (34%), and a contract that protected them against layoffs (18%).

Meanwhile, workers in Germany and France were found to have the highest levels of job satisfaction, with 30% of German workers ranking their experience at work at nine or ten, and 57% of French workers scoring between seven and eight. In Germany, 80% of young people also said their work/life balance was just right, or better than expected.

The survey said this could be attributed to Germany offering the widest range of working hours and models, and is indicative of the reason why 75% of German workers plan to remain in their jobs for the rest of 2022, or the foreseeable future.

“The results suggest that today’s young people are prioritising compensation and security partly due to the cost of living crisis, but poor relationships with managers coupled with unsatisfactory pay, and unclear career opportunities means a quarter are seriously considering leaving their roles within a year,” said Ronni Zehavi, co-founder and CEO at HiBob.

“These findings suggest young people in tech have lost faith in their employers and the tech industry’s big promises. Responsible employers should take this as a warning and listen to their concerns or risk losing the best and brightest.”

The survey also found that flexible hours were the most valued workplace condition among young people, with one in four joining their current company due to a flexible working model. However, one in five said that lack of time in the office and the opportunity to build relationships was one of the things they liked the least about their role.

Nearly half (49%) said their immediate team and co-workers were what they liked most about their company, while poor relationships with their managers were their biggest dislike.

Additionally, one in four respondents is thinking of quitting their current job despite the cost of living crisis. Workers in the UK, Sweden, Ireland, and the Netherlands are particularly fearful they will be laid off. In Europe, 27% of young tech workers think they could be fired in the current economic downturn, while in the UK the figure is 37% and in Sweden 33%.

The world is currently chewing through a never ending argument about where, exactly, people should be doing their jobs. There are both benefits and downsides to working from home or the office, but a small Berlin-based startup would like you to know one thing: these are not the only options.

Hans-Gert Stuke and Tim Jaudszims, the managing directors of Tiny Space, see hybrid work a little differently. They feel there is an in-between that can offer all the benefits of the office, and city life, but with the privacy and convenience of home. Their idea, which they claim benefits nature and local communities too, is, quite simply, a wooden cabin next to a park.

We meet Stuke inside the company’s first prototype, which was set up by the Wrangelbrunnen park in central Berlin. On first impressions, the cabin is quaint and smells like a brand new shed, with a Tardis-like quality in that it looks much larger on the inside. Stuke sits at a table that can be folded away, with his back facing a large corner window. He’s unable to see the many passersby that are briefly distracted by the unusual little house parked on the side of the road.

The cabin could fit at least eight, possibly ten, people, although it might need more seating. In truth, it looks a tad underfurnished, presumably because it’s a prototype, with just a speaker, table and monitor built into the side wall. There is decent lighting in the ceiling – solar powered – although the corner window beautifully illuminates the space. Eventually, Stuke points out, there will be some kind of blind or curtain system in place for privacy. But, for now, we can enjoy a peaceful view of dogs playing on the grass and the tall trees waving in the gentle breeze.

The night before, the cabin was some five miles away outside the lively Bikini shopping centre for a promotional event with its partner, Teufel, a Berlin-based electronics manufacturer that provides the speakers for the cabin. However, the aim is to have this one, and more, serve as stationary coworking spaces dotted throughout the city.

A tiny house by the park

Stuke is something of a seasoned entrepreneur, having previously built a MedTech startup with some 90 employees. When time came to move on and search for a new project, he noticed there was a unique opportunity within the hybrid work space.

“We were looking at different coworking spaces in Berlin,” Stuke explains. “But we didn't really find any cool coworking spaces, and the entire process of getting into one was not nice. The places were not nice, and it was relatively expensive. The worst thing was that you couldn't be fully on your own; if you wanted to book a meeting room, that would cost you like €14 an hour.”

At this point, Stuke mentions the third co-founder of Tiny Space, the person that actually built the cabin, Moritz Jüdes, the company’s technical director. Jüdes runs another small company in Berlin that creates structures out of wood. It was his desire to find a ‘tiny space’ in which to work that brought all three together.

One day, Jüdes said he had “booked a tiny house” where he could shut the door and everything out, according to the company’s website. Jaudszims was fascinated by the idea, but that was all it was – an idea. Jüdes hadn’t actually booked anything because it didn’t exist – so they set about knocking one up.

The concept of Tiny Space and its cabins, however, works on three core principles. Firstly, the cabin is truly tiny, at just 6.2 square metres. Secondly, the window, which will always be in the corner of the cabin, is large enough to take in the full surroundings. Finally,the cabin itself is self-sustainable and even beneficial to its environment.

That last point is one its potential partners need to bear in mind as the cabins will only be fitted with products from companies that share the same eco friendly attitudes. Tuefel, for example, powers its stores and offices with 100% renewable energy from independent plants. Similarly, the cabin has a large ‘green wall’ that extracts carbon dioxide (CO2) from the surrounding area. As Stuke explains, the wall will support a type of plant that absorbs up to five trees’ worth of CO2.

The community cabin

The company wants between five and ten cabins actually fixed around one of the city’s many green spaces. Cabin number two is currently under construction, with hopefully 20 built by the end of the year. These will then be available to book on an hourly basis.

“The price will be pretty aggressive,” Stuke says. “We will charge each customer €10 euros per hour to stay here.” That, he adds, is not dependent on how many are using the cabin; a group of five, for example, pays the same hourly rate as one person.It will also be a simple case of checking availability and booking using a mobile app.

The cabin’s monitor works over Apple TV or Chromecast, with a USB or HDMI cable, so users can just plug in their own laptops and get on with a video meeting or collaborative projects. There will also be a 5G-enabled router in each, with that connectivity reaching around the park to offer visitors free connectivity, which, frankly, sounds too good to be true.

The community element is key for the founders. For the prototype cabin, there will be a partnership with the local coffee shop to offer discounts to Tiny Space customers looking to grab a brew for work. Conveniently, they will also allow them to use their bathroom facilities as there isn’t any plumbing in the cabins.

Both Stuke and Jaudszims are keen on expansion, and both have an interest in taking TinySpace to other European countries. They see the UK as an attractive destination; maybe not London given its condensed infrastructure, but other blossoming tech hubs like Manchester and Leeds, where there are lots of open green spaces.

“We see a significant development still in hybrid and remote work,” Stuke explains. “In the next ten years, people will increasingly look to create their work around life, and not vice versa. It used to be the other way around that the core of your life was work, and the rest of your life, you basically manage around it. We believe this is being turned upside down.”

Spain is set to introduce a "digital nomad" visa that could allow citizens from the UK and other non-EU countries the chance to work in the country and take advantage of the nicer weather and lower cost of living.

The finer details of the visa are still being ironed out, but it will be offered to people who work remotely for companies outside of Spain.

As an essential requirement, applicants must work for a company that derives a maximum of 20% of its annual income from Spanish firms - there is no minimum requirement here. They must also be from outside the European Economic Area and have spent the last year working remotely (at least one year). A contract of employment or proof they have been regularly employed by a company outside of Spain if they're a freelancer.

Applicants will also need to demonstrate that they will earn enough to be self-sufficient and that they have an address in Spain. What's more, for the first four years, they will be taxed 15%, rather than the full 25% base rate.

The visa is essentially a residency permit and will be valid for one year. However, it will be renewable for up to five years depending on the applicant's circumstances and spouses and children will also be eligible to join the applicant.

When the visa is finally launched, Spain will join 15 other European countries that offer a nomad-type visa, which country offering slightly different conditions. Croatia, for example, requires applicants to be earning at least €2,300 per month, whereas Iceland asks for €7,100 and Portugal just €700. Spain is said to be considering a minimum of around €2,000.

Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona are already some of the most popular destinations for the EU's digital nomads, particularly Barca which has a growing technology hub. Though the country's excellent 4G coverage makes it a great place to work in rural areas where rents are lower. It boasts one of the fastest average internet speeds in Europe with 148Mbps, which is almost double the 75Mbps in the UK.

Microsoft has called on businesses to “end productivity paranoia” with remote working and instead help staff to prioritise their work.

The advisory forms part of the tech giant’s latest Work Trend Index report, which surveyed 20,000 people across 11 countries and analysed “trillions” of Microsoft 365 productivity signals, along with LinkedIn and Glint People Science findings.

It found that, despite anxieties over a mobile workforce, most people are working better than ever. In fact, 87% of employees report they are productive at work, with Microsoft 365 productivity signals also continuing to climb.

The number of meetings held per week has increased by 153% for the average Microsoft Teams user since the start of the pandemic, with users now “flooded with meeting invites”.

However, the report found that 85% of business leaders still say they find it challenging to have confidence in staff productivity when remote working. Organisations that track activity, rather than impact, are also undermining trust, leading to what Microsoft calls “productivity theatre”.

“This has led to productivity paranoia: where leaders fear that lost productivity is due to employees not working, even though hours worked, number of meetings, and other activity metrics have increased,” Microsoft added. “Many leaders and managers are missing the old visual cues of what it means to be productive because they can’t “see” who is hard at work by walking down the hall or past the conference room.”

Nearly half (49%) of hybrid managers reported struggling to trust their employees to do their best work, compared with 36% of in-person managers. The result is soaring digital overwhelm, with employees continuously feeling the pressure to prove they’re working.

“Productivity paranoia risks making hybrid work unsustainable,” Microsoft continued. “Leaders need to pivot from worrying about whether their people are working enough to helping them focus on the work that’s most important.”

The report also concluded that companies should look to re-recruit and re-onboard their employees, with staff increasingly leaving if they feel they can’t learn new skills and develop.

Leaders must adapt to the growing trends of workers turning to job-hopping, the creator economy, side hustles, and entrepreneurship. The data shows that 77% of Gen Z and Millennial workers would stay at their employer longer if they were allowed the flexibility to pursue side projects for additional income, while 52% said they were likely to leave their role within a year.

“Rather than ignore or fight these trends, the best leaders will prioritise learning and development to help both people and the business grow,” Microsoft said.

Elsewhere, the report found people mostly returning to the office for social contact, with 84% of employees saying they’d be motivated by the promise of socialising with coworkers. The majority (73%) of surveyed staff said they need a better reason to return to the office than simply company expectations.

The vast majority of UK businesses involved in the nationwide trial of a four-day working week have said they have been working at the same or improved rate of productivity as a typical five-day week.

Nearly half of those involved (49%) reported improved productivity since starting the trial and 46% said theirs had been maintained, allaying the fears that fewer work days would lead to a drop in output.

The UK’s official trial of the four-day working week began three months ago and is now halfway through. More than 70 organisations are involved, including more than 3,300 workers.

The trial is run by 4 Day Week Global and the mid-trial results also revealed that 86% of participating organisations plan to keep the working dynamic after the trial ends.

An almost equal proportion (88%) also said the trial is working well for their business so far and the majority (78%) said introducing the trial was a ‘smooth’ process.

“We are learning that for many it is a fairly smooth transition and for some, there are some understandable hurdles – especially among those which have comparatively fixed or inflexible practices, systems, or cultures which date back well into the last century,” said Joe O’Connor, CEO at 4 Day Week Global.

“While for most organisations the pilot prompts many pleasing discoveries and outcomes – a lot of businesses have more flexibility and nimbleness among their people and teams that leaders often know at the outset – there is friction for others, and this can be based on a variety of factors, many of which can be addressed or substantially improved in the pilot itself.

“4 Day Week Global and our partners are supporting these businesses to ease their transition to a flexible work model, and using the findings to inform the process for many more businesses to trial, adapt, and reap the benefits of emphasising productivity over time – thereby transforming the world of work for all of us.”

Claire Daniels, CEO at Trio Media, a digital marketing agency, said the trial had been an “extremely successful” endeavour which has led to the business performing 44% better financially.

Other businesses reported initial challenges such as adapting to changing workloads and managing annual leave more carefully but overall reported better employee wellness and greater productivity.

What is the UK’s four-day working week trial?

The UK followed other countries in trialling a four-day week in June 2022 after results from other nations revealed positive outcomes for those involved.

Iceland’s four-year trial, which took place between 2015 and 2019, is arguably the most well-known in the world and showed benefits to productivity and happiness across various industries including healthcare, offices, and schools.

The trials inspired a score of others, including the UK, to launch their own. Spain announced a three-year trial in 2021 during which participating businesses would reduce weekly working hours to 32, with the government reimbursing companies for any lost revenue.

Other countries like Ireland, the US, Japan, Belgium, and Scotland are also planning or have already begun trialling their own pilots.

The UK’s experiment is based on the 100:80:100 principle whereby workers receive 100% of their pay in return for 80% of their usual output, with the expectation that 100% of their previous productivity remains.

This model goes against other implementations of four-day working weeks where extra hours were added to the four working days to make up for the single lost day.

The same format was adopted by UK fintech Atom bank in 2021 - dropping hours but keeping the same salary.

In 2020, supermarket chain Morrisons announced a four-day week strategy that only saw head office staff make the change while also having to work one Saturday per month to recoup the lost working hours.

The UK's ongoing programme is being run in partnership with the Autonomy think tank and the results are being analysed by researchers at Cambridge University, Boston College and Oxford University.

Open source giant Red Hat has revealed that its staff can come into the office as many times as they like, or work from home indefinitely.

If they choose to return to the office, however, employees will find a redesigned space and collaborative "neighbourhoods" awaiting them, according to chief people office Jennifer Dudeck.

More than 30% of Red Hat staff worked remotely before the pandemic, Dudeck wrote in a blog post. However, the software provider is expanding that flexibility to offer its employees the freedom to be 'office-flex' and choose the amount of time they spend in the office. Senior leaders, though, are still encouraged to work from one of the company's offices to "interact and learn more", Dudeck said.

One of the reasons for expanding the remote work policy, according to Dudeck, is to take away the limits of location. This allows the company to find and attract diverse talent. It also helps its current employees manage their lives better.

However, Dudeck included a section in the blog post that details the changes the company is making to its office spaces and, more importantly, its culture. Under the subhead, "the office is a vibe", Dudeck explains that its work areas need to be more than simply places of work.

"With the majority of our associates having the flexibility to decide when they would like to use the office, we realised it needed to be a place where associates can connect to Red Hat's culture, collaborate and engage more fully," Dudeck wrote. "Simply put, if associates are not going to the office all of the time, it's even more important that it's fun, functional and enjoyable when they do."

One of the first changes is "neighbourhoods" which will be spaces where teams gather to work; these will have fewer desks and more booths, sofas and small collaboration spaces, according to Dudeck. There will also be an "open decision hub" which will act as a central place for staff to participate in decisions, voice opinions, conduct surveys and monitor how well company decisions have gone.

"Looking at the Open Decision Hub, associates can see which leaders are driving an issue, what is open for feedback (and what's not) and where we are in the decision process."

Red Hat's approach to hybrid work appears to be as full-on as Salesforce, which announced an end to the 9-to-5 last year. Both, however, are in stark contrast to other tech giants, like Apple, Microsoft and Google, which have all settled on three-day remote working weeks.

In the UK, we used to take the word ‘crisis’ with a pinch of salt. But a combination of the pandemic, the war in Ukraine, Brexit, and the consistent ineptitude of a never-ending Tory government, has created a cost of living crisis that’s made salt too expensive.

As such, the country is in a state of perpetual crisis; one of its own making. This is only going to get worse in the winter when an unfathomable rise in gas and electricity bills push us all into crippling debt. There’s no avoiding it, either, despite the fact many remote workers are now considering whether it’s more cost-effective to come into the office than use the energy in their own homes.

Martin Lewis, of MoneySavingExpert fame, explained the problem far better than anybody, a couple of months ago, when he simply said he had no more money-saving tips to share. Yet, here we are, on the brink of this latest crisis, with people who should know better still claiming there’s a way through it. Indeed, I wouldn’t bother asking Google how to save on energy bills because it will just point you in the direction of naive guides that recommend ‘tips’ like using the hob instead of the kettle to boil water. Such advice will likely only knock a few pennies off the estimated cost of powering your home, which is projected to hit an average of £3,549.

Over the last few days, articles in the New Statesman and The Telegraph have questioned whether working from home is now too expensive. The unaffordable rise in energy bills is going to put an end to the remote working revolution, is the key suggestion. To be fair, these voices aren’t wrong: it’s going to be too expensive to work at home. The problem is that it’s going to be too expensive to do anything at home, whether you work there or not, as an 80% increase year-on-year is still going to leave you drowning in price rises.

Going to the office might save you some money off your electricity bill, but only if you live close enough that you hardly pay any travel fees. I will also just point out that train prices have also surged, and getting into London from one of the surrounding counties costs roughly the same, per year, as you may expect to pay to power your home this winter. The issue is worse in the North of England where public transport is limited but oddly more expensive, as the Mayor for Manchester, Andy Burnham, has repeatedly explained.

Some people want a full-scale return to the office and they will use any old excuse to make it happen. You may have seen Alan Sugar’s recent tweet, in which he branded someone a ‘scumbag’ for suggesting working from home was a good thing.

Lord Sugar thinks this practice is for “lazy gits” who are simply watching television instead of working. This completely ignores the extensive research showing how remote work has actually led to a rise in productivity, as well as the fact that, very soon, few of us will be able to actually afford to watch the telly in the first place.

The tech industry has seen a pronounced decline in job postings in recent months but demand for new office space in tech-heavy cities declined among the least in July.

That’s according to the latest VTS Office Demand Index (VODI), which tracks new tenant tour requirements – both in person and virtual – of office properties in core U.S. markets and is the earliest available indicator of upcoming office leasing activity.

In terms of job posting measures, the tech industry registered a more pronounced decline in recent months compared to the overall labor market, which peaked around late 2021 and early 2022.

The contrast was particularly notable in San Francisco and Seattle, where the VODI found Indeed job postings to have fallen by 9.4% and 9.5% since March, respectively. For comparison, all other markets registered declines of between 1.8% and 6.5%.

Despite this decline, demand for new office space in the cities declined the least in July, falling just 7% and 14% month-over-month, respectively – which is still well below their pre-pandemic normal, VTS said.

“At the city-level, the slight cooling of the job market, does not appear to have impacted new demand for office space so far,” commented Ryan Masiello, Chief Strategy Officer of VTS.

“Despite recent economic concerns within the tech industry, which have even included layoffs at high-profile companies, office demand in Seattle and San Francisco actually fared better in July than the other VODI-tracked cities, which is likely due to the reluctance of tech firms to re-emerge in the market meaningfully from the pandemic trough.

He added: “It remains to be seen whether these tech-centric markets will see office demand impacted on a larger scale in the coming months.”

Overall, New demand for office space fell to just over half of its pre-pandemic pace in July. Countrywide demand dropped 11 VODI points from 63 to 52 in July, which equates to a 17.5% month-over-month decline, falling to its lowest level since February 2021.

While July declines are typical – July 2018 saw a 4.5% drop, followed by a 5.7% fall in July 2019 – this one is three times greater, VTS said.

“We’re used to seeing demand for office space cool in summer months, but not at this rate,” commented Nick Romito, CEO of VTS. “Unique to 2022 is an economic outlook that is continually shifting and is likely contributing to a reduction in new office demand, as uncertainty causes some potential tenants to delay or reconsider their current office space needs.

This month’s declines also come after three months of relative stability observed in the VODI, he added.

“Quarter-over-quarter, the VODI is down 20 percent, similarly in the quarterly trend to that of this month’s 17.5 percent fall speaks to that stability,” he continued. “The continued positivity in labor market performance is a hopeful indicator as we gauge employers’ reactions to other economic concerns in the months to come.”

Chicago, Boston, and New York City saw the largest VODI declines in July, with all three cities having a relatively large share of finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) among their office-use demographic.

It’s a sector that is particularly sensitive to rising interest rates – a characteristic that aligns with these cities’ sharp decline in new office demand. As a result, demand in Chicago dropped 29.9% to below half of its pre-pandemic pace, while Boston and New York fell 26.1% and 16.2% month-over-month respectively.

When it comes to the consumer, the choice over whether to buy a laptop or a desktop is a simple one. It's down to personal preference and there isn't really a way to highlight a clear winner to everyone.

However, from a business perspective, your choice can have much wider ramifications. Kitting the workforce out with business laptops is generally more friendly to a hybrid work model, with flexibility being at the heart of every decision. Desktops are very much stationary machines, and may seem a tad old fashioned in a modern business context, but they may, in fact, be the best solution open to you.

Laptops vs desktops: What's the difference?

Although it's pretty obvious from a consumer perspective, the difference between a desktop and a laptop will be more nuanced for businesses, particularly as any decision will have a knock-on effect for other considerations down the line.

The desktop is a stationary computer that will sit next to, on top of, or under one desk in the office, and will likely not be moved until it's broken or replaced. The whole setup will be spread across multiple devices and peripherals, including a dedicated business-class monitor, webcam, keyboard, and mouse. As such, desk type and size are a big consideration if you're rolling out desktop PCs.

Laptops, on the other hand, are all-in-one computers that have the screen, keyboard, processing hardware, and mouse functions bundled into a single device. Offices that allow staff to use laptops usually have bare desks and more choices around seating plans and hotdesking practices. People can usually take their laptops anywhere in the building, rather than sticking to a specific seat and cubicle. Docking stations are now commonplace in offices, allowing staff to plug in their laptops to access additional functionality, whether that's ethernet internet connections or external monitors.

Price is also a factor as the cost of a laptop is generally higher than what you would pay for a similarly-specced desktop, at least initially. For example, a 24in iMac with 8GB of RAM and a Magic Keyboard will start at £1,249, whereas a Macbook Pro (13in) is roughly £100 more. Of course, the decision to provide workstations with external monitors can drive up the overall investment.

Where a desktop might incur more cost is its capacity for an upgrade, but these might not be necessary depending on your business needs. You can increase GPU and CPU specs and customise most components at will, but, regardless of how much investment you feed into a desktop, it will remain a stationary machine that may limit your office in terms of seating and remote working.

Laptops vs desktops: Is a laptop better than a desktop?

For the average business, the additional flexibility, ease of use, and capacity to support remote working make laptops by far the most common choice. In terms of logistics, they're by far the most sensible option, as you can easily ship a pre-configured laptop to an employee, while still having the option of supplying additional hardware if necessary.

However, from a performance perspective, desktops offer the best return on investment, typically allowing you to access far more powerful components at a cheaper price. For example, when similarly specced, a laptop will almost always be more expensive than a PC - you're essentially paying for the extra flexibility.

The same is true for external hardware, such as monitors. A laptop is limited by its size to weight ratio, and so ultra-portable laptops generally favour smaller screens with less advanced display technology. However, moving to a dedicated monitor opens up a much wider choice of technology, whether that's larger screen sizes, higher resolutions, or faster refresh rates. You may even be able to push your luck and source some pretty powerful display tech - as those who use a gaming monitor for work can attest.

Easier access to components makes desktop PCs an ideal choice for any employee involved with demanding tasks, such as creating projects using the Adobe software suite. These tend to place huge strain on system RAM and CPUs, something which you can easily compensate for by upgrading a desktop PC on the fly. Laptops are comparatively limited in their flexibility, and if a laptop is not powerful enough for a task, it will typically mean refreshing the device for something newer.

The wider availability of cheaper and smaller components may eventually make desktop PCs entirely obsolete in the workplace. However, it's fair to say you'll be powering your business on both types of machine for the foreseeable future.

The taxation of UK employees that work from home or overseas is being looked at by the Office of Tax Simplification (OTS), an independent consultancy that works with the government.

A consultation into how companies are adapting to the increase in remote working options is being launched, with findings set to be published in spring 2023.

The OTS assessment will look at how working from home or across boards can affect tax and social security for businesses, and their employees. This will also include an examination of the "digital nomad" visa which is now offered as a lure to mobile workers from many countries. The issue here is that these different jurisdictions have uneven and or conflicting tax policies.

The rules for those looking to work for a UK business but from overseas are not exactly simple and have a heavy dependence on the region you reside in. The main issue is the amount of time you plan to work from abroad; if it is just a few days, it is unlikely to trigger any legal consequences, but the longer you do work abroad the greater the risk that you will be subject to taxation in both your country of residence as well as the region your employer is based.

So a short-term period, under six-moths, will be subject to tax in the UK, but you or your employer will have an obligation to report your situation to the relevant financial authority for the country you reside in. Any period longer than six months, but shorter than a year will mean you are still taxable in the UK and also subject to taxation in the country you reside in. To avoid both would require an employee to be working abroad for more than a year.

Around 38% of employees that earn more than £40,000, annually, in the UK are listed as "hybrid workers" and have worked away from the office at some point over the seven days to 8 May, according to the Office for National Statistics.

Typically, employers require staff to request permission to work outside of the UK, though some companies are bucking the trend with more expansive policies. An example of this is Airbnb which has a "work anywhere" policy.

I was today years old when I learned 👀 means you're looking at something. As in, if someone posts a document into a channel, you send 👀 to clarify that you are, indeed, looking at the thing.

I’m not 100% convinced this is correct, admittedly, but it's true according to a survey presented by the workplace collaboration platform Slack and language app Duolingo – released today for Word Emoji Day. I know, there’s literally a day for everything 🙄.

Nevertheless, 9,400 people took part in the poll, representing mobile workers across the US, Asia and Europe. Their interpretations of emoji use in the workplace, and how it contributes to office culture, however, just add more confusion – for me, at least.

For example, the survey found an example of unusual emoji in which an unnamed group of workers deploys a racoon (🦝) when someone’s posted in the wrong channel. I don’t think I’ve ever used the racoon myself, but I’ve definitely posted something in the wrong channel by mistake many, many times. If one of my colleagues replied with '🦝' I’d be confused. I don’t even know what I'd use it for; replying to a racoon picture? Purchasing a racoon? I literally don’t know, but, if I worked at this mystery workplace, I’m sure I'd pick it up quick enough.

This is because emojis are a type of unofficial style guide, tailored and deployed in ways that are specific to the team and the individuals that make it up. ‘Unofficial’ because it's largely unimportant to leadership – they won’t care what you use unless you’re being inappropriate; 🍆, for example, is a potential HR issue, although the survey suggests 56% of Chinese respondents claimed to not know its dual use 🤨.

Within an organisation, the people that make it up will have their favourites, and the more creative types in the team will even create custom ones. Over time, a unique language will evolve. At IT Pro we tend to use the traditional 👍, 🙌 and 👋 mostly. But our idiosyncrasies have given birth to many variations of the party parrot; including ‘beer parrot’, ‘sassy parrot’ and, my favourite, ‘partycage’, which is party parrot melded with the face of Nicolas Cage.

We once had a collection of custom emojis that poked fun at one of our loveable old editors. They depicted him as an ogre and a dinosaur – lovingly – I’m led to believe. What’s more, our newest team member has already added a dancing Ewok– created and added to the database on his first day. In doing so, he’s signalled himself as both a Star Wars nerd and a fun guy – a very welcome addition to the team.

It’s safe to say that emojis are now fundamental and universal communication tool that help us navigate a sea of workplace platforms, and this is largely driven by the use of platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams and WhatsApp. The survey suggests 53% of respondents use emojis for workplace messages, with 67% saying it makes them feel closer to their colleagues, although 30% say they'd never send an emoji to their boss.

The platform does also appear to be an important aspect, because emoji use isn’t the same through the medium of email. In fact, it could hinder a career path, according to research from Tel Aviv University. Emojis suggest a lack of “power” and may lead to colleagues and bosses thinking less of you, apparently. The first thing to point out here is you probably don’t need to send your colleagues an email, especially if you have instant messaging services. After all, if you only have access to a Gmail account, there’s an instant chat function within that, so stick to it and let the emojis fly.

Rumours about Manchester being among the greyest and rainiest parts of the UK are true; it was made abundantly clear within days of moving here from London two-and-half years ago. Plop me in the middle of the beautifully warm desert and the bustling Las Vegas life, however, and you’ve got a perfect playbook to please a northern-based Brit.

It was my first time abroad since COVID-19 took hold and I’ve been itching to get back to in-person conferences since. Everyone from senior execs to delegates shared in this energy, with the community feel at Cisco Live 2022 shining through.

The networking giant put on a great show that felt as grand as ever, despite the reduced attendance. But a limitless supply of goodwill and upbeat energy couldn’t mask a handful of frailties, particularly given Cisco’s troubles during 2022 so far, as well as its muddled messaging around hybrid work. Although the industry giant made strides in terms of security and networking, sweeping claims it’s solved a list of issues with the new way of working were less convincing.

Cisco shows customers some love

One of the standout observations of Cisco Live 2022 was the company’s ingenious framing of its innovation strategy. Cisco threaded its key themes of unification, visibility, observability and simplification throughout the week’s programme as well as in its product launches and the approaches it highlighted.

This philosophy was put into action in the way it showcased how new cloud management products for Catalyst and Nexus switches bring greater visibility to enterprise networks, for example. Cisco also showed how a unified identity and access client can make both employees’ and IT teams’ lives easier.

IT departments can start benefiting from Cisco’s approach to innovation today, and the networking giant did a great job of showing it prioritised its customers’ needs. High praise indeed, given my oft-cynical outlook on such claims.

Cisco was clear that it believes businesses are facing an increasingly complex IT environment. Business-critical applications are all over the place, residing in different clouds and other areas, impacting the efficiency of IT teams. All of this is compounded by the rise of hybrid work. This, in turn, is adversely impacting the end-user experience too, and is why the company is embracing a platform approach to new products, which it believes will allow for better interoperability and happier IT teams generally.

Cisco, ultimately, showed attendees it wants to make their lives easier, which went hand-in-hand with the gratitude CEO Chuck Robbins voiced to customers for sticking with the company over the past few years. This was a little more than a nod to its supply chain issues, that have had a knock-on effect on its financial performance.

Incidentally, there was little mention of the post-pandemic issues the company has been facing, but Cisco Live 2022 didn’t go without assurances that concerns are being taken care of. The firm even made light of its struggles at times, with Robbins and Ford CEO Jim Farley, for example, lamenting their shared supply chain issues while discussing a new partnership (more on that later).

Cisco’s silver-bullet solution to hybrid work woes

A reduced audience capacity exemplified the theme of hybrid work, which the company says is here to stay. However, “hybrid work doesn’t work…yet” was the tagline of its second and final keynote address – which Cisco somewhat wasted – and was used to justify a slate of product launches the company feels will ‘solve’ the issues this model presents. These amount to a disconnect in meetings between office-based and remote workers, and issues with non-verbal communication in video conferencing setups.

Live virtual whiteboard software took care of the latter point, with office-based and remote workers collaborating on a shared document, all powered by Webex Desk hardware. Non-verbal communication was more interesting to me as a linguistics graduate who spent time studying it. The artificial intelligence (AI) tools coming to Webex that beam the faces of in-person attendees into individual windows during a video call, were impressive, but I failed to see how it’d genuinely replicate the social cues and body language signals that are often missing from hybrid meetings, despite Cisco’s best efforts to convince otherwise.

Among Cisco’s new units were also all-in-one specialist video conferencing stations of varying sizes – launches that one exec told me they believed to be original innovations, despite the fact I pointed out many already exist in the market. Some units were unique, granted, but I had to ask Cisco if I was misinterpreting these outlandish claims.

To my surprise, I misinterpreted nothing. Aruna Ravichandran, SVP and CMO at Webex by Cisco, told me that yes – Cisco does, in fact, believe it’s solved the hybrid work issues it identified with these launches as well as in-development augmented reality (AR) and hologram tech. Possibly an extension of the metaverse trend, the products allow people to take more meetings throughout their homes – which sounds awful – but there was some admittedly cool AI tech baked into the hardware, too.

Cisco’s partnership with Ford, meanwhile, involves shipping vehicles with Webex functionality as standard. I was told, and I kid you not, this wasn’t only so workers could take meetings in the car – which also sounds awful – but also for those times lots of employees are in the same car together, and need to be in the same meeting – which beyond being highly implausible, sounds awful again.

Cisco should have just led on the genuine innovations it’s bringing to the table, rather than make sweeping claims around ‘solving hybrid work’. There’s nothing wrong with trying to promote its latest products – just don’t frame it to be the silver bullet it most certainly isn't.

Cisco asks for a show of trust

In 2019, Cisco pushed the rather confusing message “you make possible”, which was printed on complimentary t-shirts and backpacks. Three years on, I still can’t get my head around what it means. Even a now-former member of Cisco’s US comms team mocked the strapline, at the time.

One pandemic later, Cisco’s messaging is still a little skew-whiff, but the overriding sentiment remains the same. The networking giant used Cisco Live 2022 to thank customers and imbue the impression its future is in safe hands, despite the turbulence of recent months.

I thought this approach was well executed, while its new security and networking products represented solid steps in the right direction. IT teams will be pleased with the additional capabilities coming into their hands, too, and leave with the promise that once that supply chain backlog clears, Cisco will be back to breaking earnings records once again.

Coined in the 1970s, Karoshi is the Japanese term used to describe death from overwork. For a nation with a corporate culture steeped in tradition, and haunted by a history of illness-inducing overcommitment, to introduce a four-day week is akin to a cultural revolution.

Yet, last June, the government proposed as much to improve the nation’s work-life balance, with officials gently nudging – rather than mandating – companies to allow their staff to cut down the traditional five-day working week. Now, government leaders are hoping to capitalise on the wider trends of remote and flexible working to convince bosses these benefits can be extended to a shorter working week.

It could be extremely difficult to implement, though, as it grates against Japan’s corporate traditions and a rigid working culture that prides devotion to the workplace. This conflict could be the reason, for example, why Microsoft – which held a successful four-day week trial in summer 2019 – didn’t follow through with implementing the changes, in the end.

COVID-19, however, has changed the equation. Japanese businesses transformed the way they operated, with many defying conventional wisdom to prove they were still able to function – even when employees were working from home and not subject to the unescaping gaze of management. As traditional working methods and rigid office structures go toe-to-toe with the modern age of hybrid work, the prospect of a four-day week hitting the mainstream could be a watershed moment for Japanese corporate culture.

It’s a small, but essential, step

The Japanese government has recommended a four-day week to boost the productivity of middle-aged office workers, says professor Naohiro Yashiro, vice president and professor at Showa Women’s University. Specifically, a shorter working week could allow these workers to improve their information and communication, and management skills. You can’t gain these skills through on-the-job training, and workers need to dedicate at least two days a week for formal education outside the workplace. The government also hopes to encourage people to continue working while caring for children, says Yashiro, with a shorter working week helping families in which both parents work full-time.

“Finally, reducing the working days in a week would provide a better opportunity for workers with multiple jobs to increase household incomes under a stagnant Japanese economy with no increase in the average wage for decades,” explains Yashiro.

Yashiro believes acquiring an extra free day each week could be a small, but essential, step in granting employees independence from a totalitarian corporate culture. A significant hurdle in implementing a four-day week, though, will be compensating the missing day while maintaining equality between those who take the option and those who don’t.

To maintain a 40-hour week, raising working hours from eight to ten is one solution. Another is scaling back wages pro rata, says Yashiro. If allowed, using paid holidays, too, would benefit the worker, as only half of them are used on average in Japan.

There are also worries that employees’ loyalty may diminish as the extra time provides an opportunity to have multiple jobs and turnover. “Unlike general perception, the Japanese employees in the large firms are not necessarily satisfied because they are entrapped by the employment security and the seniority-based wages,” underlines Yashiro.

“It contrasts with their British counterparts, who could easily change their job if they’re not satisfied with their current position.”

Promoting a healthier work-life balance

During the 1970s, when Karoshi was prevalent, Japanese employees worked more than 2,000 hours per year, while their US counterparts worked just over 1,800. Then, in the late 1980s, people in Japan began to reconsider the values which had previously justified longer working hours, explains Shinichi Takasaki, director of the International Labour Office (ILO) for Japan. Working hours became a major policy issue, and were reduced from 48 to 40 hours per week with the 1987 amendment to the Labour Standards Law. Then, in the 1990s, many employers began to adopt a five-day week.

“At that time, the introduction of the system began under a long-term plan to gradually reduce the number of working hours according to the size of firms because it was clear that it takes time for the concept to be shared widely throughout Japanese society,” says Takasaki. Likewise, today, the four-day week had been considered an option to fight the COVID-19 pandemic for the last two years, but gathering knowledge around its benefits and drawbacks has only just begun.

Unlike in the past, working styles that promote a healthy work-life balance have become more prevalent. In an industry in which it’s challenging to secure staff, the only way is to appeal to those who want diverse and flexible ways of working, Takasaki continues. The most significant driver of the policy is productivity. Ideally, wages should remain the same even with a four-day week, he says. Some large companies may be able to adopt automation and other measures, but it’s unclear to what extent this is feasible.

Although some large companies have started to adopt the four-day work week, the wider business landscape doesn’t understand it enough for it to take off, explains Takasaki. The barriers to adoption, too, are higher in other countries. Although the days when working long hours was considered a sign of diligence are fading, he says, it’s still favourable to work face-to-face. Although things are changing, the cultural forces persist.

When remote working became commonplace during the pandemic, many employees, not just senior leaders, reaffirmed the value of face-to-face communication. Takasaki underlines this may have happened everywhere, not just in Japan, and is something that should be taken into consideration.

Wrestling with historic tensions

The government is trying to loosen labour regulations in the hope that industry will flourish but, historically, industry doesn’t necessarily do what the government wants, says Will Jasprizza, managing director at Intralink Japan, a British business development consultancy specialising in Asia. “When the government allowed fixed-term contracts in the 1990s, the hope was that it would create more flexibility in the labour market,” he explains. “Instead, companies used the new rules to cut costs further – hiring people on short term contracts and creating two classes of employee.”

Large firms will find it easier to adopt a four-day week than small, regional companies. Companies with a strong international aspect and high-profile CEOs – like Yusaku Maezawa of Zozotown or Hiroshi Mikitani of Rakuten – are more likely to embrace the idea, but there’s no certainty it’ll happen.

Some companies have already experimented with four-day weeks, including rice milling machinery maker Satake, Sompo Himawari Life Insurance and Yahoo Japan, all in 2017. In the case of Satake, however, clients complained, so the company allowed workers to alternate their additional days off. The latter two, however, only offered this perk to those who cared for children or ageing relatives. More recently, in April 2021, systems developer Encourage Technologies embraced it to attract and retain younger staff, Jasprizza adds, while pharma company Shionogi is doing so to give staff time to “learn new skills”.

Zozotown CEO Yusaku Meazawa (pictured) is among a number of business leaders more likely to embrace the four-day week

At smaller companies, though, the owner will have a more traditional view of employment. “He, and it is almost invariably a ‘he’, will feel he “owns” the time of his employees, so he’s hyper-focused on the hours they’re working rather than how productive they are,” explains Jasprizza. For many business owners, the company gives you everything, so you have to repay that with loyalty and hard work – which doesn’t include a three-day weekend.

One managing director, Jasprizza tells IT Pro, starts work 40 minutes before the 9:30am start time. Then “like a factory foreman of old” spends his day watching the shopfloor. He stays until 7:30pm, a full hour after the working day is done, putting subtle pressure on everyone to stay, because to go before him means standing up in front of everyone and saying “excuse me for leaving before you”. It’s anecdotal, but the company is based in central Tokyo, and highly representative of the old-school type of Japanese SMB, he says.

It partially explains Japan’s productivity crisis, with the country ranked 23rd of 36 OECD nations. Jasprizza asks: why would the managing director reduce staff days? He feels he’ll get less from his workers, with this attitude rubbing off on them too. It’s as if management only cares that you're at your desk; there’s no motivation to become more productive – especially if you’re going to be at the office until 7:30pm anyway.

If a four-day week was implemented, Jasprizza thinks it would make people reassess what’s essential to their jobs and what’s done for the sake of it.. He points to the Microsoft trial in Japan which resulted in a massive reduction in time-wasting internal meetings.

“The key point is Japanese work culture needs to be improved, but workers and company bosses don’t need to sell their souls in the process – they can strike a balance of being faithful to their traditions, histories and long-term strategies while adapting to the modern environment – including digitisation and remote working,” says Jasprizza.

Solving Japan’s productivity crisis

Japan’s companies certainly have a productivity problem, agrees Parissa Haghirian, professor of International Management at Sophia University in Tokyo. Traditionally, roles aren’t clearly defined nor are they performed by one employee. In Japan, employees are first hired by the company, then transferred to the departments at which they’re needed.

“There’s no work division in Japanese companies like in Western firms; in theory everyone can do every job,” says Haghirian. “This also means the Japanese constantly learn new processes in new jobs, many managers are transferred to new departments every two years, and this learning process is supported by older colleagues, and by performing tasks together.”

Many of these processes aren’t documented, too, so there’s a constant interaction between employees and team members, and, in Japan, there can be up to 200 people in one big office room. Learning is experience-based and done on the job, and everybody is involved in every process, she explains. This very personal and interactive working style is costly and difficult to digitise, but it exists because many employees in Japan stay in one firm for decades. During the pandemic, this proved problematic. It’s also the reason why many companies switched back to office-based work as soon as they could.

Haghirian believes the four-day work week will help companies be more productive, as it’ll motivate them into delegating and defining tasks and roles, and giving employees more independence. Remote work can also save costs as office space and commutes in places like Tokyo are expensive. Lastly, it can also help the work-life balance of employees, given many commute three hours per day.

Japanese corporate culture has made monumental strides since the 1970s, but Haghirian concedes it’ll be easier for some companies than others to make the next step, for better or worse. Larger organisations with a high degree of delegation, like law firms or media companies, will introduce a four-day week for the benefits. So, too, will younger companies or those embedded in technology. It’ll be more difficult, however, for smaller businesses and those steeped in tradition to help bring the four-day week into the mainstream.

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Over 3,300 workers across 70 UK companies have started a four-day week trial, in what has been called the biggest ever pilot of its kind to take place anywhere in the world.

The trial will be based on the 100:80:100 principle, which states that 100% of an employee’s pay will be given in exchange for 80% of their typical work time, provided they commit to maintaining at least 100% productivity.

The pilot will run for six months and is being organised by 4 Day Week Global along with the future of work think tank Autonomy, the 4 Day Week UK Campaign, and researchers from Cambridge University, Oxford University, and Boston College.

The companies taking part in the pilot come from a range of sectors and include small businesses and large corporations. They include sectors like banking, financial services, IT software training, automotive supply services, online retail, telcos, digital marketing, and food and beverage.

“As we emerge from the pandemic, more and more companies are recognising that the new frontier for competition is quality of life, and that reduced-hour, output-focused working is the vehicle to give them a competitive edge,” said Joe O’Connor, CEO of 4 Day Week Global. “The impact of the 'great resignation' is now proving that workers from a diverse range of industries can produce better outcomes while working shorter and smarter.”

Researchers are set to work with each participating organisation to measure the impact on productivity in the business and the wellbeing of its workers, as well as the impact on the environment and gender equality.

Government-backed four-day week trials are also aiming to begin later this year in Scotland and Spain.

“We'll be analysing how employees respond to having an extra day off, in terms of stress and burnout, job and life satisfaction, health, sleep, energy use, travel and many other aspects of life,” said Juliet Schor, professor of Sociology at Boston College, and lead researcher on the pilot. “The four-day week is generally considered to be a triple dividend policy - helping employees, companies, and the climate. Our research efforts will be digging into all of this.”

An Apple executive who left the company over its strict return-to-work policy is reportedly set to join Alphabet’s DeepMind.

Ian Goodfellow oversaw machine learning and artificial intelligence at Apple and left the company recently due to a lack of flexibility in its workplace policies, according to Bloomberg. Apple had been planning to require corporate employees to work from the office for three days a week, beginning this month. However, this deadline has now been put on hold.

DeepMind will be bringing Goodfellow on as an individual contributor, with the new hire known as a key machine learning researcher. He’s the most senior employee known to leave over Apple’s office working policy.

Goodfellow was a director of machine learning within Apple’s Special Projects Group and supervised engineers working on autonomous technology. The director level is one of Apple’s most senior levels, with the company containing around 1,000 directors out of a total of 170,000 employees. He is credited with creating generative adversarial networks (GANs) which allow computers to accurately create images or data sets, making research more effective.

The former Apple employee has worked for Google in the past. Goodfellow was a senior staff research scientist from November 2018 to March 2019, and a staff research scientist from March 2017.

Apple employees have complained about the push to return to the office, explaining they’re more productive at home and that remote work saves time and energy that would be spent commuting.

“Everything happened with us working from home all day, and now we have to go back to the office, sit in traffic for two hours and hire people to take care of kids at home,” a different former Apple employee told Bloomberg last month.

The rule to have employees work from offices three days a week may be changing, however. This was adopted in April and was meant to go into effect from 23 May onwards. Yesterday, the tech giant told employees that the deadline had been delayed for the time being, but workers are still expected to be in the office for two days a week.

Alphabet’s return-to-office policy is said to be more relaxed than Apple’s, as it has approved exemptions for most employees seeking to work from home. However, it is unclear what DeepMind’s remote work policies are. It’s currently hiring for several positions at its office in London, and the job postings do not mention any form of hybrid or remote work available as part of the roles. IT Pro has contacted DeepMind for comment on this.

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Google has officially opened its long-awaited Bay View campus that aims to entice workers back into the office.

First announced in 2017, the Bay View campus is the first to be fully developed and built by the tech giant. The all-electric building is located only a seven-minute drive from Google’s main headquarters at 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway and is capable of seating 4350 employees.

Divided into two levels, the ground floor combines meeting rooms and cafés that aim to provide opportunities for workers to make real-life connections and foster collaboration. The upper level, however, is divided into noise-buffered cubicles that enable team members to focus on their tasks – as well as connect with remote-based coworkers using video conferencing equipment.

Google’s director of R+D for the Built Environment, Michelle Kaufmann, described the upper level as “more quiet”, allowing Googlers to “focus on that immediate team”.

The design of the Bay Area campus has been based on Google’s commitment to “operate every hour of every day on carbon-free energy by 2030”. The building is powered by nearby wind farms and sources solar power through its innovative dragonscale rooftop panels, which are separated by large overhead windows, allowing for natural daylight and reduced electricity consumption. It also gathers rainwater using above-ground ponds, which serve as water sources for cooling towers, flushing toilets, as well as irrigating the landscape as part of the tech giant’s commitment to replenishing 120% of the water it consumes by 2030.

Commenting on the newly-unveiled Bay Area campus, Google’s Real Estate & Workplace Services VP David Radcliffe said that, “with a distributed workforce, an office needs to create harmony between those who are in the office and those who are elsewhere”.

“The flexible nature of the focus and collaboration spaces at Bay View is just one way to accommodate these changes. I truly believe these buildings will keep up as we introduce new spaces to improve hybrid work,” he added.

Google employees were required to return to their designated offices in April, with most required to attend at least three days per week as part of the company-wide hybrid work policy. However, with many reluctant to leave their home working spaces behind, the tech giant has opted to lure its US workers back to the office with a free e-scooter, while also planning further large-scale campus investments.

Remote workers might soon be able to do their jobs and shop for groceries at the same time, under a new "Spaces" project between Tesco and flexible office operator IWG.

A trial at a branch of Tesco in New Malden that will start later in this month and will accommodate 12 private desks, 30 co-working spaces and a meeting room.

The 3,800 sq ft space within the store would normally have been used for electrical goods, music, and other forms of entertainment, most of which are now mainly purchased online. The aim is to make better use of floor space and, if successful, Tesco stores across the country could become hybrid working hubs.

"We are pleased to be working with IWG to offer customers the chance to work more flexibly from their local Tesco," said Louise Goodland, head of strategic partnerships at Tesco. "We are always looking to serve our customers and communities better and we will be interested to see how they respond to this new opportunity."

The partnership for co-working spaces reflects new attitudes to employment as a result of the pandemic. Work areas are popping up in more unusual areas, and businesses are also seeking to reduce their own office footprint, as employees look to find office-like environments that are closer to home. Around 72% of workers would prefer the ability to work flexibly rather than returning to five days a week in the office, according to IWG's own research.

"People don't want to spend hours commuting every day and instead want to live and work in their local communities," Mark Dixon, the founder and chief executive of IWG, said. "A Tesco Extra in a suburban location, in the middle of a vibrant local community, is the perfect location for flexible office space.

"New locations in suburban areas will transform communities and are a response to the growing demand we are seeing from customers who want to live and work locally."

By 2030, up to 30% of the UK's office market could be made up of flexible space, according to property advisory company JLL. It is currently less than 10%.

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Airbnb employees can work from "anywhere" across the country they live in and even enjoy up to 90 days of work abroad, according to its new remote work policies.

The update to its remote work position is in stark contrast to most hybrid work trends, with companies offering a certain number of days working from home or, in some cases, none at all.

In a company blog post, which has also been emailed to employees, Airbnb's CEO Brian Chesky outlined a new five-point policy that allows staff to choose whether they work from home or the office. They can also move anywhere in the country they work, without losing compensation, and also have the "flexibility" to work and travel around the world. The firm will continue to provide regular gatherings and aim to operate in a "highly coordinated way".

For Airbnb employees who want to move, as long as they stay within the country, their pay won't change. However, that isn't the case if they chose to move from the US to another country, as the company uses regional pay structures; London employees are paid differently from those in San Francisco, for example.

Employees can, however, opt to work around the world for up to 90 days. From September they can choose from 170 different countries to travel to, though they will still need a fixed address in their original country for tax and payroll purposes. This will still require authorisation from a line manager as issues like different time zones will need to be taken into consideration.

Airbnb's announcement coincides with new research that suggests people around the world would look for a new job if an employer wanted them back in the office full-time. According to security firm Kastle, this is the case for two-thirds of the global workforce. Its report surveyed more than 32,000 workers from the US, India and Europe, and found 64% had said they would consider a new position if working from home was no longer offered.

Remote working policies have been hotly contested between employees and employers since the onset of COVID-19. This has even been a difficult issue for the technology firms that develop the software and hardware that enables remote working, such as Google and Microsoft.

Within the discourse, though, there have been examples of companies putting remote work at the core of their business models. These include firms like Salesforce, which declared "the 9-to-5 dead" with its flexible working policies and Fujitsu, which, similarly to Airbnb, enabled all of its Japanese employees to work from anywhere in the country.

New data has revealed the best UK towns and cities for those looking to work remotely.

A total of 104 locations have been ranked based on factors like house prices, green spaces, crime rates, air quality, local GP numbers, the quality of local schools, and broadband speeds, in price comparison service Uswitch's first ever Hybrid Working Index took.

York topped the chart as the UK’s ideal hybrid working location, which Uswitch broadband expert Ernest Doku attributed to “superfast broadband, huge amount of green spaces, and close proximity to work hub Leeds”.

Harrogate was another North Yorkshire town that made it to the top five best places for hybrid working. However, local hub Leeds was ranked 17th due to its high crime rates.

Edinburgh and Belfast were second and third on the list respectively, combining fast broadband speeds and relatively low house prices, while also being major office hubs in their respective areas.

However, some of the UK’s biggest cities, including London and Manchester, were found to be lower on the list due to their high crime rates and house prices, with comparatively slow broadband. While York had an average speed of 159 Mbits/sec, London’s and Manchester’s were at least 35% slower – at 102 Mbits/sec and 95 Mbits/sec, respectively.

Commenting on the findings, Doku said that “the last few years have turned our working lives on their head, and many of us have enjoyed the benefits of leaving the commute behind and spending more time at home”.

“It’s been an opportunity for many to escape the rat race, move away from the big cities and enjoy life in more rural settings,” he added.

Recent research found that one in two UK workers would consider quitting their job if the hybrid working option was removed.

Doku described the speed and reliability of broadband connection as a potential deal-breaker when moving to a new area to work from home.

He advised those moving houses to research the local broadband speeds before fully committing to a new area.

“Once you’ve got the move confirmed, don’t forget to let your existing (and potentially new) broadband provider know, so you’re not left offline when the big day comes,” he added.

The full rankings are detailed below.

Europeans are being asked to work from home and reduce the amount of oil and gas they consume in a bid to thwart Vladimir Putin and his country’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine. That’s according to a nine-point plan outlined by the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the European Commission.

If successfully followed, the steps could help to save enough oil to fill 120 supertankers and enough gas to heat almost 20 million homes. There’s also a minor footnote suggesting the move might be better for the environment, but that’s really just an afterthought here.

“Faced with the horrendous scenes of human suffering that we’ve seen following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, people in Europe want to take action,” says Fatih Birol, executive director of the IEA. “This guide has easy-to-follow steps that with little or no discomfort on our part can reduce the flow of money to Russia’s military and help put us on a path to a cleaner and more sustainable planet.”

This has very big ‘dig for victory’ energy, as one of my colleagues pointed out. In reality, though, it highlights the latest evolution of remote work, which was previously something of a luxury in pre-pandemic times. It was once reserved for top bosses, or niche job roles, but then, seemingly overnight, it became a solution to stop the spread of COVID-19. Over the last year or so, too, it’s been a major requirement for job applicants and a lure for businesses to attract talented individuals. Now, though, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine exasperates oil and gas supplies, and the general cost of living reaches a crisis point, working from home has started to look and feel more like a sign of poverty.

In the UK, specifically, many people can’t actually afford the commute to the office anymore. According research from recruitment firm Ransted, this is being acutely felt outside of the London bubble, where transport links are either limited or too expensive. The company’s survey of almost 3,000 British workers found that 9 out of 10 have pushed their employer for more time working from home simply because it's too expensive to drive in or use public transport. You may not have seen the work the mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, is doing, fighting for more affordable transport. He recently posted examples of travel from the North (on a train) that’s more costly than some international flights.

I myself used to do four days a week in the office before the pandemic, but looking at my finances now I don’t know how I would be able to do that again – and I’ve had three wage increases since then. This isn’t simply a case of my employer paying me more, either. Nor is it a case of cutting back on non-essentials. Nobody is going to live a healthy lifestyle eating just economy brand pasta, nor can they save all that much by dropping Netflix, as certain public figures like to assume. Funnily enough, Netflix recently lost 200,000 subscribers, which can be put down to greater competition in the streaming market, but we also can’t rule out the possibility that some just can’t afford it anymore.

In the absence of a competent government, or sensible structures of pay at gas companies, the future looks pretty grim for working-class Britain. One of the major concerns during the pandemic was a looming mental health crisis for all those of us that were stuck at home from nine to five and beyond. That might need to be updated to include poverty-induced anxiety with full-time workers weighing up the cost of food, heating and travel to the office.

This article originally appeared in issue 26 of IT Pro 20/20, available here. To sign up to receive each new issue in your inbox, click here

Big tech companies have emerged as the biggest winners of the pandemic. While the chaos caused by lockdowns and stay-at-home orders severely disrupted the global economy (GDP decreased by 3.4% in 2020) technology companies have continued to report exceptional growth since the crisis began.

The so-called big five – Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google – increased their market capitalisation at the end of 2020 by 52.8% year-on-year. These firms are now collectively worth almost $10 trillion, with growth fuelled largely by the worldwide shift to remote working and global organisations’ accelerated shift to cloud computing.

Despite major growth, sustained largely as a result of a surge in demand for their services, all while their own employees worked remotely, these companies have championed a return to the office at every turn. This has led to a series of awkward u-turns and policy reversals. Many companies, nevertheless, still insist their workers should ready themselves to work in the office up to three days a week once the pandemic is over.

Many tech firms claim a return to the office is essential for collaboration and socialising among employees, but there are likely a number of other factors at play – including investment in office space. Some experts believe the mixed messages centre around issues of workplace trust, too. Although they powered the global remote working shift, tech CEOs may paradoxically believe staff working from home aren’t putting in a full day’s shift; work can only be carried out sufficiently if employees are in a physical workplace, with bosses peering over their shoulders.

In keeping with tradition

Google recently announced it’ll spend £730m to expand its office footprint in London, while Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out a memo last June saying employees should plan to work in an office at least three days a week, despite complaints. Although Apple’s plans have since been put on hold due to the spread of the Omicron variant in the US, he said at the time: “For all that we’ve been able to achieve while many of us have been separated, the truth is that there has been something essential missing from this past year: each other.”

This sentiment has been echoed throughout the industry; Netflix boss Reed Hastings, for instance, simply claims he sees no positives in remote working, while Google CEO Sundar Pichai claims that seeing workers in offices fills him with “optimism”.

Hastings (pictured) has derided the notion of remote work as a “pure negative”

This flies in the face of the benefits we’ve seen as a result of remote working, which has itself been fuelled by the same companies and the cloud-based tools they’ve pushed to businesses. The majority (63%) of employees report feeling more productive as a result of working remotely, for example, while most workers also report a better work-life-balance. Many also applaud the gains made on disability inclusion, and on helping women to close the longstanding gender gap.

Benefits also extend far beyond the business, Callum Adamson, CEO and co-founder of work-life balance platform Distributed tells IT Pro. This is because it’s paved the way for globally distributed teams which, in turn, enables more efficient asynchronous working. “Cultivating teams distributed around a country, or beyond, means each member spends their money in the location they’re based in, which contributes to better wealth distribution,” he explains. “Investing in the global economy, rather than concentrated urban centres, can also improve local infrastructure such as education and healthcare. The solution to solving global inequality is, of course, far more complicated, but we cannot ignore the potential.”

One rule for them

Given widespread gains, why are the world’s greatest disruptors clinging onto tradition? It all comes down to culture, according to Molly Johnson-Jones, CEO of flexible jobs platform Flexa. “If senior leaders trust their staff and want to boost retention, they’re embracing genuine flexible work – choice over where, when and how individuals get the job done,” she tells IT Pro. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to flexible work, and different companies will have different ‘core’ expectations of how things need to be done – and that’s absolutely fine. What’s not fine is imposing a blanket office policy on all staff and expecting them to go along with it.”

Adamson agrees, adding the inherent concern with remote working has always been about trust: “It’s hypocritical and quite frankly insulting to these companies’ workers, who have proven to their bosses time and again that they’re both capable and willing to work efficiently and effectively from home,” he says. “Taking that freedom away from them risks reverting back to old stereotypes of not trusting employees and not giving them credit to work effectively and efficiently – like adults – without being micromanaged.”

This issue of trust has been longstanding in the tech industry. Google, for example, recently found itself in hot water after allegedly terminating the contracts of employees who spoke out against its ties with US immigration agencies. This reportedly moved Google’s head of HR Eileen Naughton to step down. The late Apple CEO Steve Jobs, too, infamously fired people without severance pay while he was at Pixar, and similarly didn’t award equity to those who worked at Apple pre-IPO.

It was widely reported that Jobs (pictured) fired people without severance pay, contributing to feelings of mistrust

Many businesses believe IT is the exception to the rule when it comes to staff working productively outside of the office. Last year’s massive Facebook outage, for example, is a case study many employers will now use to demand a return to the workplace, according to COO of cyber security recruitment consultancy Focus on Security, Jamal Elmellas.

“Much of the delay when responding to the configuration update that went so badly wrong was blamed on the fact only 25% of its staff were in the office,” he says. “Insiders claim the delay was caused because the workers who could fix the issue were effectively locked out of the data centre. Unfortunately, the Facebook story will be used for some time as an example of why IT is the exception to the rule when it comes to remote working when, in fact, it should be a lesson in the need to adjust all aspects of the business, including incident response.”

The Big Tech resignation

If tech firms continue to insist on a return to the office, they risk losing skilled workers, who’ll be tempted to work for a competitor affording stronger remote working rights. Twitter, for example, announced staff didn’t need to return to the workplace, while Slack is pursuing a permanent “virtual first” strategy. This stands in contrast with a number of Silicon Valley giants that have persisted with return-to-work orders.

Indeed, most workers plan to leave their current role if they’re not offered flexibility, Johnson-Jones tells IT Pro. “That’s a huge amount of people who won’t put up with a return to pre-March 2020 working practices,” she says. “The minority of firms that aren't acknowledging this are creating a staffing rod for their own back at a time of global labour shortages.”

“Rather than acting as a magnet for talent, this could negatively impact businesses’ ability to attract skilled workers,” Adamson adds. “Other businesses shouldn’t see a return to the office as a template for success. Having an office space is a pre-pandemic relic that, if anything, hinders employee experience and business success.

“For tech companies that rely on expert tech and developer skills, this means increasing office investment and mandating attendance could well backfire, restricting access to the best technically skilled workers across the UK and around the world. It undermines a company’s efforts to be an outstanding employer and tech industry leader.”

It’s unlikely the so-called big five will openly explain why they were among the first to march employees back to offices. It’s clear, however, there are various factors at play, be it a lack of trust in remote workers or the long-disproved belief that staff can only work at their full capacity when they’re surrounded by their colleagues. No matter the reason, the hypocrisy is clear; while they’ve generated billions of dollars due to remote working – which has afforded their employees a better work-life balance and, in most cases, improved productivity – they’re failing to learn the lessons, with potentially dramatic consequences.